21–30 of 124 posts
"I made an OpenAI-powered Linux shell that guesses your bash command": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0UnS3jHhAA
Instead of wrapping sed with a bash script to get multiple expressions to do their things, I normally use 'sed -e'. sed -e s/a/A/ -e s/foo/BAR/ -e s/hello/HELLO/ I use -e often enough that I usually use -e whether I expect to use more than one expression or not. There's a reasonable chance that I will be going back into my history and will need to add another, which is easier if the first -e is already there. Also, '…
Something I crave in the worst way is a sensible story for accumulating a “toolbox” of snippets and scripts and commands. They don’t need to be ready to go, but ideally: - natural language searchable - add a small description - CLI to search, examine, and copy - not a plugin - sync with a GitHub repo.
I stumbled on this lately, which I've borrowed myself and I'm finding it pretty convenient: https://ianthehenry.com/posts/sd-my-script-directory/ Shell completions are essential for it, so I had to stumble through writing my own for Fish, but now that it's setup it's quite nice.
Btw if you like fish autocomplete, you might be interested in fig.io.
We've spent a bunch of time making is super easy to add your own completions for scripts or custom CLI tools. :)
I really dislike sed, awk, and all these utilities because I just can’t remember how to use them. Every time I want to use one of these tools I have to relearn the stuff, and then after a while I forget how to use it. If I don’t use it all the time I just forget. I really don’t think non-interactive CLIs are a good way to do complicated tasks.
And if you do use them frequently enough, you might not even need to refresh/relearn anything.
I really dislike sed, awk, and all these utilities because I just can’t remember how to use them. Every time I want to use one of these tools I have to relearn the stuff, and then after a while I forget how to use it. If I don’t use it all the time I just forget. I really don’t think non-interactive CLIs are a good way to do complicated tasks.
I think the problem is that they fall into an uncanny valley between "simple tool" and "verbose programming language"; they are really terse languages wearing a simple tool's sheepskin.
I really dislike sed, awk, and all these utilities because I just can’t remember how to use them. Every time I want to use one of these tools I have to relearn the stuff, and then after a while I forget how to use it. If I don’t use it all the time I just forget. I really don’t think non-interactive CLIs are a good way to do complicated tasks.
I'm mostly with you (except for your last sentence). I've picked up a lot of languages over the years, and can fall back into most of them pretty fast, but sed and awk especially are hard. On the occasions that they really are the best tool for the job, I get actual books out and set aside a window of a few hours to plod through it. I think the problem is that they fall into an uncanny valley between "simple tool" an…
And when one is using awk/sed that script is often invoked from a shell, bash for instance. And since the awk/sed can't hold its own as a general purpose programming language, now I am writing bash code, a personal sin.
Awk/sed made sense for the time and place they are from, but things have changed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm mostly with you (except for your last sentence). I've picked up a lot of languages over the years, and can fall back into most of them pretty fast, but sed and awk especially are hard. On the occasions that they really are the best tool for the job, I get actual books out and set aside a window of a few hours to plod through it. I think the problem is that they fall into an uncanny valley between "simple tool" an…
If I measure time to solve a problem and not line count, using a language like Python or Ruby might be 2x the lines , for a line count approaching zero anyways, not sure that matters. Performance is comparable and I don't need to relearn anything and someone else who doesn't know awk/sed doesn't need to learn it. And when one is using awk/sed that script is often invoked from a shell, bash for instance. And since the…
Okay, acknowledged. Python and Ruby are superior in every regard. Would you mind letting us chat about sed and awk now for a minute?