11–20 of 341 posts
at the same time, it is a bit of a hack. what is the minimal non-hack version of this technique? seems abstractly like liking a file-descriptor.
thanks for the article. it reminds to get better at awk.
I wish that shell would be more sane. I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. If you need a programming language, then better use one. There is xonsh if you are looking for something like this. I think there should be a better bash with an very clean and consistent interface. Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the b…
Bash (and other shells too) is like it is, because it's an accretion of 50 years of history rather than a singular top down design.
If you dislike POSIX sh, consider looking at Plan 9's rc before you look anywhere else (including bash): http://man.9front.org/1/rc
Also, I would advise you to learn about these four tools in depth: sh, sed, awk, and make. Learn when to use each, and don't use one when another would be better.
I wish that shell would be more sane. I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. If you need a programming language, then better use one. There is xonsh if you are looking for something like this. I think there should be a better bash with an very clean and consistent interface. Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the b…
Perl had very good performance, despite being a "scripting" language, because so many of the tasks that a typical shell script might need to do were supported by built in features in the language (for example handling regular expressions, interacting with command line arguments, exec'ing other programs).
Today, once a shell script requires very much logic, I'm inclined to use Python. I know Python and find programming in it easier than Perl and bash and other shells. Furthermore, other programmers understand Python better than bash.
I wish that shell would be more sane. I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. If you need a programming language, then better use one. There is xonsh if you are looking for something like this. I think there should be a better bash with an very clean and consistent interface. Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the b…
It wouldn't be coherently unixy if it was. Small tools that do a limited subset of things, and reliably take/output data from stdin/stdout is the way unix is done. sh is just the glue we use to tack it all together. Bash (and other shells too) is like it is, because it's an accretion of 50 years of history rather than a singular top down design.
I wish that shell would be more sane. I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. If you need a programming language, then better use one. There is xonsh if you are looking for something like this. I think there should be a better bash with an very clean and consistent interface. Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the b…
If these design points turn out to be over-constrained and have to make major compromises, yes the next thing I would try would be a small separate language for shell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't be coherently unixy if it was. Small tools that do a limited subset of things, and reliably take/output data from stdin/stdout is the way unix is done. sh is just the glue we use to tack it all together. Bash (and other shells too) is like it is, because it's an accretion of 50 years of history rather than a singular top down design.
One of the best things (in my opinion) shells could have done is do newline separated filenames instead of spaces, which would make filenames with spaces much easier to handle (you can have newlines in filenames, but in this magic world let's ban those).
Perhaps if Rust had five mutually incompatible borrow-checkers which get called based on who wrote the code for a particular language construction-- that might get across the frustration I feel when using the shell. (Well, honestly I just StackOverflow for the shell incantation I need and that seems to work well enough.)
TIL "git status -s". So much ad hoc bad parsing no longer necessary!
Many other commands have such an option. As an example, iproute2 has -json.
I wish that shell would be more sane. I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language. If you need a programming language, then better use one. There is xonsh if you are looking for something like this. I think there should be a better bash with an very clean and consistent interface. Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the b…
Absolutely agreed, shell is in many respects terrible.
>I don't think that a shell should be a complete programming language.
On the contrary, I think shell should be a more complete programming language! Drop the stringly typing and add actual types (hence eliminating 80% of bothersome awksedgrep magic; yes, no need to tell me it's a real tall order), add proper error handling...
I truly value simplicity where possible, but I think that the primary interface that I use to communicate with my computer should be as powerful as possible. Numerous times I've built up a shell pipeline only to realize near the end that I need to do something that shell is horrible at, and had to redo the whole thing in Python from scratch. I cannot really see a reason to limit it.
>Some of the most commonly used utils like awk '{ print $2}', sed, grep, sort, ... should be included out of the box to improve performance and to provide consistency across distributions.
UNIX "philosophy" got a lot of things wrong, but not this one. These common utilities you mention are good especially when they're separate, because it's not the shell's job to improve performance, provide consistency, etc... of a dozen and a half different utilities, a number sure only to grow in time as people discover what commonly used thing they want in their shell. Though I'll give you that `awk '{ print $2 }'` should definitely be its own utility or a built-in.