I either use Bash (which is actually a decent programming language if you spend the time to learn it properly) or Python.
Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
21–30 of 162 posts
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#22[flagged]
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Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably it's meant to be used when you're writing a shell script and you have some problem in front of you that would be trivial to solve in a real programming language and you find yourself saying a sentence starting with "I just wanna…" and rage-googling or asking ChatGPT or whatever.
Would be great if it could show some things it can do that awk can’t. Because awk is typically my Swiss Army knife if I run into these situations.
I think it's written by someone who finds pipes and awk too awkward to work with.
I know people who can't be bothered to learn these tools and write complete programs to solve problems instead of a shell one-liner.
Looks similar.
Edit: My brain skipped words while typing.
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#24Title should be > Dt: Duct tape for your Unix pipes ^^^^
Curiously enough, not really, from the post: Excuse me, is it "duct" or "duck" tape? I mean sure, "duct tape" and "duck tape" are both fine. "Duct tape" is the more common name today. The older name is "duck tape" after the duck cloth under the adhesive. As an aside: If you care about such things, make sure to read up on how today's common version became popular. A 51-year-old woman named Vesta Stoudt, mother of 8, m…
Barely a day goes by I don't learn something surprising on HN that's entirely unrelated to IT/software dev.
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#25This article links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Stoudt , which links to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_duck , which explains that the word "duck" here comes from the Dutch doek , or "linen canvas".
TIL that "duck tape" is actually the correct/original version, and "duct tape" is a modern derivative.
I had always assumed it was the other way round, and some people simply don't know what a duct is so they substitute a similar-sounding, more common word.
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#26This article links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Stoudt , which links to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_duck , which explains that the word "duck" here comes from the Dutch doek , or "linen canvas".
Yeah which explains that duck tape is not for ducts (or pipes) since it's made of fabric. > She is often misattributed as the inventor of duct tape. However, numerous variations of adhesive cotton duck tape had existed for decades, nor did she invent the specific formulation of the popularized duct tape.
That is not what the thing you quoted says, or even correct. All duct tape is made of fabric and it is… well duct tape, so ducts were the intended use case when the name was created.
Duct tape has kinda become a general term for all cloth-based tapes though, so you can indeed find duct tape not intended for ducts, but the fact the name was originally “duck tape” has nothing to do with that.
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#27Nushell has filled this void for me. It elevates pipes by structuring them into lists or tables. It has all sorts of goodies for manipulating those data structures like inserting/updating rows and cells, better string interpolation, useful utility functions like case transformation, and more.
Agreed. Nushell fulfills the Unix philosophy promise that the standard Unix tools have been breaking since forever. Traditional Unix commands feel like a hodgepodge of hacks by comparison, that only work together occasionally, and even then mostly by accident.
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#28up: Ultimate Plumber for shell
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#29This article links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Stoudt , which links to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_duck , which explains that the word "duck" here comes from the Dutch doek , or "linen canvas".
TIL that " duck tape" is actually the correct/original version, and " duct tape" is a modern derivative. I had always assumed it was the other way round, and some people simply don't know what a duct is so they substitute a similar-sounding, more common word.
Me too! The situation isn't helped by the registration of "Duck Tape" as a trademark for a specific brand of tape -- but that appears not to have happened until 1981, well after both names were in common use: https://trademarks.justia.com/733/00/duck-73300816.html
Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes
#30Nushell has filled this void for me. It elevates pipes by structuring them into lists or tables. It has all sorts of goodies for manipulating those data structures like inserting/updating rows and cells, better string interpolation, useful utility functions like case transformation, and more.
Agreed. Nushell fulfills the Unix philosophy promise that the standard Unix tools have been breaking since forever. Traditional Unix commands feel like a hodgepodge of hacks by comparison, that only work together occasionally, and even then mostly by accident.
The Unix philosophy doesn't dictate any specific data format to interoperate between commands, besides this being data streams, and typically text. Commands are free to interpret these streams however they want, which is why this seems like "hodgepodge", but in no way were tools breaking any sort of promise.
FWIW I've been using *nix machines for decades, and very rarely have I had the need to use structured data between commands. Yes, it would make things cleaner or more robust in certain cases, but in practice there are common ways of handling this. E.g. most tools support outputting or inputting null-terminated lines.