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More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

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Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#51

Post by guitarbill »

Annatar wrote: post #17

From the article: I am not a fan of Solaris's long standing refusal to touch anything. This is what people often deeply misunderstand about traditional UNIX operating systems: one of Solaris' greatest features, in stark contrast to GNU/Linux, is the insistence on not breaking backward compatibility. Solaris has however delivered less(1) as standard since Solaris 8, so there is nothing stopping one from configuring th…

> one of Solaris' greatest features

Features are use-case specific. One person's feature is another person's bloat. (Personally, I side with the article author on this.)

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#52

Post by ComodoHacker »

frederikvs wrote: post #8

I can see the fossilization, but I don't see what's so typical Unix of that phenomenon. Windows still includes cmd.exe with all its broken, retarded features, while it has powershell, which is supposedly (no experience myself) a little less retarded.

cmd.exe is not so fossil, it even get bugfixed from itme to time. But Windows still includes COMMAND.COM!

    Microsoft(R) Windows DOS
    (C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1990-2001.
    
    C:\USERS\USER>ver
    
    Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
    
    C:\USERS\USER>

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#53

Post by knz42 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

Now all we need is someone to modify less to recognize that its standard in is connected the output of more so that if you type `cat /etc/passwd | more | less` it could output something which, more or less, looked like the input.

It actually works already :)

(more does not page if its stdout is not a terminal)

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#54

Post by chungy »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #52
frederikvs wrote: post #8

I can see the fossilization, but I don't see what's so typical Unix of that phenomenon. Windows still includes cmd.exe with all its broken, retarded features, while it has powershell, which is supposedly (no experience myself) a little less retarded.

cmd.exe is not so fossil, it even get bugfixed from itme to time. But Windows still includes COMMAND.COM! Microsoft(R) Windows DOS (C)Copyright Microsoft Corp 1990-2001. C:\USERS\USER>ver Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601] C:\USERS\USER>

Disclaimer: Only the 32-bit x86 versions of Windows. Ones that include the NTVDM ;)

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#55

Post by sjellis »

rollthehard6 wrote: post #18
sjellis wrote: post #15

I've used Linux for a decade-and-a-half, but I've never totally loved the shell, because of the need to learn this sort of pointless arcana. PowerShell was a massive step forward, and I had hoped that an Open Source, cross-platform equivalent would develop so that we could get past the current local maxima of 1970s-era design. It's rather weird that the Open Source equivalent of PowerShell is now...PowerShell. Even i…

I dunno, I'm a long term *NIX person (Solaris 1994-2011, Linux on and off 1994-2006, Linux mostly 2006-now) I am now involved in more Powershell scripting on Windows than I have ever done before. I don't see - Get-Content -Tail 10 FILE as an improvement on - tail -10 FILE I think when it comes to the combination of intuitive command names and terseness when required, VMS' DCL is still unsurpassed. Having commands wit…

Well, once you know that PowerShell uses the verb "Get" for fetching data, and the noun "Content" for file contents then those are reusable bits of knowledge that slot together with other verbs and nouns. It's easy to hold in your head and build your knowledge over time, and better yet, the third-party add-ons obey the common conventions, so you can experiment with confidence.

When you learn the *NIX command-line from scratch, everything is special cases, so the whole experience is peering at man pages and slowly rote-learning commands and options. The only commonality is that if you try to guess, you'll probably be wrong. My patience with the philosophy of independent tools hit breaking point a while ago, when I had to start learning the different CLI tools from rival cloud providers - so much to learn, and no consistency at all.

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#56

Post by chriswarbo »

sjellis wrote: post #15

I've used Linux for a decade-and-a-half, but I've never totally loved the shell, because of the need to learn this sort of pointless arcana. PowerShell was a massive step forward, and I had hoped that an Open Source, cross-platform equivalent would develop so that we could get past the current local maxima of 1970s-era design. It's rather weird that the Open Source equivalent of PowerShell is now...PowerShell. Even i…

> There are now new Linux users starting every day, and asking them to learn that less is better than more is not funny.

I think the article was more critical of commercial Unix vendors than Linux. From the article:

> Oddly, FreeBSD has done the most sensible thing; they've outright replaced more with less. There is a /usr/bin/more but it's the same binary as less and as you can see the more manpage is just the less manpage. OpenBSD has done the same thing but has a specific manpage for more instead of just giving you the less manpage.

> On Linux, more is part of the util-linux package but its manpage outright tells you to use less instead

The Free/OpenBSD choice seems sensible; presumably there are Linux distros which do the same. I imagine that if, say, Ubuntu or Debian makes a choice like this, it would propagate quite quickly to other distros; it would presumably be less of a breaking change than switching /bin/sh from bash to dash.

> It's time we dropped the "Bash is good enough" arguments.

I've rarely heard anyone claim "Bash is good enough". I do agree with the argument that bash is overused, and anything more than a trivial script should be done in a "proper" language (e.g. Python, which is installed by default on pretty much all Linux distros and OSX).

I'm not sure if there's a clear winner(s) for interactive use (i.e. a pareto improvement). Many use zsh, but I don't think it goes far enough. More radical alternatives like fish, ipython, etc. seem too fragmented at the moment. Maybe there needs to be momentum from a high-profile distro shipping such a shell as its default (while maintaining /bin/sh, /usr/bin/env bash, etc. for compatibility with existing scripts)

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#57

Post by NoGravitas »

sjellis wrote: post #15

I've used Linux for a decade-and-a-half, but I've never totally loved the shell, because of the need to learn this sort of pointless arcana. PowerShell was a massive step forward, and I had hoped that an Open Source, cross-platform equivalent would develop so that we could get past the current local maxima of 1970s-era design. It's rather weird that the Open Source equivalent of PowerShell is now...PowerShell. Even i…

I kind of feel like Linux people have gotten used to using Python (or similar?) for anything that is complex enough that shell is not enough. Which is also not perfectly suited to the domain, but enough that learning a third thing to do sysadmin-type scripting is not appealing.

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#58

Post by SixSigma »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

Now all we need is someone to modify less to recognize that its standard in is connected the output of more so that if you type `cat /etc/passwd | more | less` it could output something which, more or less, looked like the input.

I hereby award you a "Useless use of cat" award [1]

more http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat

Re: More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization

#60

Post by SixSigma »

frederikvs wrote: post #8

I can see the fossilization, but I don't see what's so typical Unix of that phenomenon. Windows still includes cmd.exe with all its broken, retarded features, while it has powershell, which is supposedly (no experience myself) a little less retarded.

But that was originally command.com, to command.exe to cmd.exe

There is no "edit" or "edlin" any more or "ftp" or "telnet" or "tr" :(

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