It’s clever, but is not aesthetic. A comma feels unnatural in the fs.
Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
21–30 of 252 posts
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#22(2009)
Previous discussions:
2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40769362
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#23 Every tool and shell that lay in arm's reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#24This is one of those ideas that is so simple and elegant that it makes you think “why did I never think of doing this?!” Neat trick! I don’t think I’ll namespace everything this way, because there’s some aliases and commands I run so often that the comma would get annoying, but for other less frequently used helper scripts then this will be perfect!
I do something similar with build trees, naming them +build, +cross-arm etc.
This convention was suggested by the GNU Arch version control system years ago (maybe 20??), but it's really useful for the same tab completion reason and I have kept it for almost two decades, even when I switched to git.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#25I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally. If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally. And if I EVER need to call grep…
> If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one
... and breaks existing scripts that reference the system one, right?
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#26Every tool and shell that lay in arm's reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename. WTF. After 40 years maybe I should have figured that one out.
It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start that syntax with the open brace will remind you about the need to escape a literal comma there if you ever want one.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#27Why so many people use ~/bin/? What’s wrong with ~/.local/bin?
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#28I didn't like the idea. I prefer the alternative approach: _I_ decide the order of dirs in the PATH env. If I introduce an executable with a name, that overrides a system one - I probably do that intentionally. If I introduce an alias (like `grep='grep --binary-files=without-match --ignore-case --color=auto`) that matches the name of a system binary - I probably do that intentionally. And if I EVER need to call grep…
curious if you're customizing anyway, why not use eg ripgrep?
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#29> Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory
`.local/bin` seems to be much more common in my experience for this use case. And for good reason.
Re: Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
#30Why so many people use ~/bin/? What’s wrong with ~/.local/bin?
Nothing. I also use `~/.local/bin/`