55 comments and nobody mentioned the incorrect English in the title?
I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
61–70 of 202 posts
Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#62On the topic of xargs replacements, I love gnu parallel. The --dry-run flag of parallel made me confident to do more batch processing than I ever did with xargs. Parallel has an option for almost everything, it's almost too much. But I have shopped around for alternatives. The creator Ole Tange maintains a painstakingly long article of the alternatives and their differences. [0] The gnu parallel book and reading mate…
Oh man, parallel is awful. I have to rant about this because I literally tried it again today morning. Every single damn time I try parallel and decide to give it another chance, something ends up not working or causing a problem. I can never get it to just do what I want and get out of the way. Today I foolishly thought maybe I was the one who was holding it wrong every single time in the past, so I copy pasted anot…
>Why the hell was perl even relevant? Nothing I wrote used Perl.
parallel is written in perl.
Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#63On the topic of xargs replacements, I love gnu parallel. The --dry-run flag of parallel made me confident to do more batch processing than I ever did with xargs. Parallel has an option for almost everything, it's almost too much. But I have shopped around for alternatives. The creator Ole Tange maintains a painstakingly long article of the alternatives and their differences. [0] The gnu parallel book and reading mate…
isn't parallel that tool that dumps some kind of begging message into your output each time you invoke it?
No? You can tell it to stop printing the citation notice.
Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#64On the topic of xargs replacements, I love gnu parallel. The --dry-run flag of parallel made me confident to do more batch processing than I ever did with xargs. Parallel has an option for almost everything, it's almost too much. But I have shopped around for alternatives. The creator Ole Tange maintains a painstakingly long article of the alternatives and their differences. [0] The gnu parallel book and reading mate…
Oh man, parallel is awful. I have to rant about this because I literally tried it again today morning. Every single damn time I try parallel and decide to give it another chance, something ends up not working or causing a problem. I can never get it to just do what I want and get out of the way. Today I foolishly thought maybe I was the one who was holding it wrong every single time in the past, so I copy pasted anot…
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Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#65Good idea but strange syntax. It would be more idiomatic if the command came first and the list of globs last. Additionally the use of "--" is not what everybody expects: here it is used to introduce one argument, the command, while it's usually meant to introduce multiple arguments without worrying if they have a leading "-". A possible revised syntax with command as the first argument followed by a list of globs op…
I thought -- was typically a separator for passing a list of arguments directly to some subcommand
Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#66Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#67> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces…
Always use -0. Most gnu utilities support it. It makes them put a null byte after every filename instead of a newline. Completely eliminates the problem of dealing with whitespace in the filenames.
Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#68> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces…
Most of this, if not all, is fixable by adding a `export IFS=$'\n'` to your bashrc. I'm not trying to disregard your project, just point out something that took me years to learn and I currently use extensively to solve this very problem. Perhaps you didn't know about it until now... :)
Re: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#69> Or maybe you pipe into xargs and pray your filenames don’t have spaces… Always use -0. Most gnu utilities support it. It makes them put a null byte after every filename instead of a newline. Completely eliminates the problem of dealing with whitespace in the filenames.
To support your recommendation and redress the strawman the article postulates, the post's author could have replaced:
find . -name '*.log' | xargs rm
find . -name '*.log' -print0 | xargs -0 rmRe: I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs
#70> Ever found yourself writing this?
for f in *.txt; do
wc -l "$f"
done
> Or this?
find . -name '*.sh' -exec wc -l {} +
> These all work, but each has its own syntax, its own flags, its own quirks. I wanted something simpler — one consistent way to iterate over anything.
And therein lies the proverbial xkcd standards[0] proof.