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Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

dt.plumbing

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Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#31

Post by jbverschoor »

dynisor wrote: post #26
reportgunner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gaffer tape

Gaffer Duck

Donald Duck

These toons stick together

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#33

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

dynisor wrote: post #26
reportgunner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always believed that the name "duck tape" was given because it is waterproof as in "water off a duck's back" and duct tape was just an eggcorn.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#34

Post by regularfry »

imiric wrote: post #30
p-e-w wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

Null separators between fields is structured data. It might just be the simplest that can possibly work (because the null character is outside the normal data range for text, unlike the newline, which demonstrably doesn't work in that sense) but it is structure. A list structure, specifically.

The world would be a much happier place if -print0 (or whatever) was universal, but no such luck.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#35

Post by foul »

bayindirh wrote: post #23
stingraycharles wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 awk ward 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.

> I think it's written by someone who finds pipes and awk too awkward to work with.

This one of substituting AWK/shell/sed/Perl with a forth-like lang is a good idea in a sense, it doesn't break the flow because presentation comes later and logic is at the beginning of the dt part, with the aforementioned tools you have the logic and output mixed all over the place. I will however still use AWK.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#36

Post by p-e-w »

imiric wrote: post #30
p-e-w wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bet…

> but in no way were tools breaking any sort of promise

The Unix philosophy as usually stated includes the rule "write programs that work together".

Most Unix commands don't work together in any meaningful sense. For example, `ps | kill` will not terminate all processes, as one might naively expect.

I'd say this is a clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Unix philosophy.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#37

Post by bayindirh »

foul wrote: post #35
bayindirh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's written by someone who finds pipes and awk too awk ward 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.

> I think it's written by someone who finds pipes and awk too awkward to work with. This one of substituting AWK/shell/sed/Perl with a forth-like lang is a good idea in a sense, it doesn't break the flow because presentation comes later and logic is at the beginning of the dt part, with the aforementioned tools you have the logic and output mixed all over the place. I will however still use AWK.

> ...it doesn't break the flow because presentation comes later and logic is at the beginning of the dt part

I didn't mean to discredit the work done. It's a big undertaking in any case. The idea and the aim is good, however it breaks the conciseness and reduces the speed of implementation.

> with the aforementioned tools you have the logic and output mixed all over the place.

I think this is a secondary effect of composability, pipe and conciseness requirement.

> I will however still use AWK.

Me too, and this is why I made my prior comment, exactly.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#38

Post by p-e-w »

gnfargbl wrote: post #29
p-e-w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What an epic failure by the trademark office. That's as if a company had tried to trademark "Hammer" as a brand name for hammers, and the trademark office just said "Yeah, sure!"

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#39

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

wizofaus wrote: post #24
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I suggested we use a strong cloth tape to close seams, and make tab of same. It worked fine, I showed it to different government inspectors they said it was all right, but I could never get them to change tape." Vesta Stoudt to President Roosevelt, February 10, 1943 [1]. History is full of "never get them to change" stories, probably one of the more famous is Napoleon's dismissal of the steam engine, although the story is a bit more complicated, "Fulton (and his design) failed at the worst possible time" [2]. As we found out recently, submarines are hard.

And on a completely unrelated note, one of the greater stories of quasi-forgotten sacrifice of a mother for her son is the story of a woman in 1850s travelling around 2,000 kilometres by foot, by horse, by any means to get her son enrolled into university, dying shortly after: her name was Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, her son's name was Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev [3], that Mendeleev.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_Stoudt

[2] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/13154

[3] https://chemaust.raci.org.au/article/julyaugust-2019/mother%...

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#40

Post by seemaze »

dynisor wrote: post #26
reportgunner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ASHRAE/UMC actually specify tape 'for ducts' to be UL 181A-P/181B-FX [0] which is commonly made of metal foil and not cloth.

[0] https://tapeuniversity.com/products/foil-tapes/ul181ap-ul181...

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