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Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mogrify - resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, and much more. Mogrify overwrites the original image file, whereas, convert(1) writes to a different image file. The whole reason for mogrify's existence is that it overwrites the original image file.

> The whole reason for mogrify's existence is that it overwrites the original image file. Then it should not exist. To save one "rm", doesn't look like a good idea to me.

> Then it should not exist.

It definitely should.

This becomed critical when you are doing batch processing large amount of images in a cloud instance or somewhere else where disk space is a constraint.

I have used mogrify and similar custom solution when trying to batch-edit gigabytes of images while cleaning data for Computer Vision training.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?

#83
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago someone taught me this memory trick for tar: imagine an angry German stereotype saying “eXtract Ze Vucking File”, thus -xzvf. No idea what it stands for but it does what I need most of the time.

x = extract, z = compress/decompress, v = verbose (list files added or extracted), f = filename follows. You can leave off the 'z' if it's a tar without compression. If it's compressed, the extension is usually tgz, tar.Z, bz2, or something else other than tar. You can leave off the 'v' if you don't want to see a list of which files are being added or extracted.

Or just replace the z with an a. That's what I mainly use.
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