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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

#111

Post by jimnotgym »

reportgunner wrote: post #61
dynisor wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, duct tape is for ducts and can't be made of cloth because the water would clearly seep through the cloth. There are strings in duct tape but not cloth. The part I quoted says that duck tape is made of cloth and therefore is not duct tape. I think people get confused because there is a brand of duct tape named Duck Tape. But even the Duck Tape packaging calls it a "duct tape".

Not all ducts carry water...

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#112

Post by JohnFen »

p-e-w wrote: post #25
gnfargbl wrote: post #12

This 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. This explains the thing about "duct tape" that never made any sense to me -- it is not the sort of tape you'd want to use on ducts.

But I grew up calling it "gaffer's tape", because it was popularly used by gaffers on film and TV sets.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#113

Post by Brian_K_White »

p-e-w wrote: post #102
imiric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I misunderstood the way it worked. But I'm not sure that approach is better. They either need to maintain full compatibility with existing tools, or users need to learn the idiosyncrasies of Nushell tools. And commands not reimplemented by Nushell wouldn't work, or they would need some kind of generic wrapper, which would have the drawbacks I mentioned. But, hey, this obviously has users who prefer it,…

> They either need to maintain full compatibility with existing tools, or users need to learn the idiosyncrasies of Nushell tools. The existing tools aren't fully compatible with each other either. There are significant differences between GNU and BSD tools, for example, and yet more differences with BusyBox and others. The idea of "standard" tools is unfortunately an illusion, so not much is lost there. But more imp…

Both gnu and bsd grep input and output a stream of bytes.

Without ever having tried it, I know that one random day when I for whatever reason have a wish to take the output from bsd grep and send it over tcp through netcat, to be collected by zsh's built-in tcp support and fed in to gnu's grep, it will work. No piece along the way made any jerk assumptions or required any any jerk tight coupling, and the bsd and gnu tools were completely compatible.

That is more valuable and greater convenience than any other poorly concieved ideas to make it more convenient.

This all 50 years after unix pipes were invented and in an environment the inventors did not even try to predict and handle. Instead they handled infinity by not trying to predict anything. They just made useful low level tools which you assemble however you may turn out to need to, and the tools make as few as possible assumptions which will all eventually break. The hammer doesn't only work with one kind of nail.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#115

Post by schwartzworld »

JohnFen wrote: post #112
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. This explains the thing about "duct tape" that never made any sense to me -- it is not the sort of tape you'd want to use on ducts. But I grew up calling it "gaffer's tape", because it was popularly used by gaffers on film and TV sets.

They are not the same thing. https://www.findtape.com/videos/gaffers-tape-vs-duct-tape/v5...

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#116

Post by NullInvictus »

bvanderveen wrote: post #14
dimator wrote: post #10

I read the page a few times but I'm still scratching my head. How is this intended to be used?

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.

My read as well.

I write shell-scripts when the current tools solve the problem easily. I distribute shell scripts to colleagues (never customers) only when I absolutely do not want to install extra software on their system.

I avoid awk and perl because if I'm going to introduce a second language to a tool, I'm not going to pick the niche ones everyone only learns opportunistically if at all. At that point I'd rather pick something my colleagues are deeply familiar with.

And on a small level, writing these little binaries that truly do one thing and do it well and that I understand intimately is a private joy.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#117

Post by JohnFen »

schwartzworld wrote: post #115
JohnFen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. This explains the thing about "duct tape" that never made any sense to me -- it is not the sort of tape you'd want to use on ducts. But I grew up calling it "gaffer's tape", because it was popularly used by gaffers on film and TV sets.

They are not the same thing. https://www.findtape.com/videos/gaffers-tape-vs-duct-tape/v5...

I'm talking about how the term was used in the studios I was exposed to.

Even in that article, the two definitions are very, very close to being the same thing, and in the studios I was familiar with, both of the tapes the article defines would have been referred to as "gaffer's tape". They're just different varieties of gaffer's tape.

It's all just slang, though, so I'm not surprised that the definition varies from crowd to crowd.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#118

Post by lelanthran »

nmz wrote: post #109
lelanthran wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The painful part of all this is that there were and still are actual record separator and field separator characters in ASCII. ASCII was perfect for table output. All tools had to do when outputting is use the standard existing characters when no TTY is detected, else use tabs/spaces and newlines. I always wondered why no one uses the ASCII rs and FS codes.

How would you deal with a tree?

Who cares?

It deals with 99.99% of uses cases that pipes are being used for right now.

That's more than good enough.

If you really needed to output a tree using only rs and fs characters, and since they are only a single byte each, you could cover that 1 in a 1000 use case by using empty fields for depth of a record, and attaching any record to the current parent until the depth changes.

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#119

Post by qbasic_forever »

p-e-w wrote: post #25
gnfargbl wrote: post #12

This 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.

Ironically the kind of tape you actually use on metal ducting isn't even duck tape, instead it's a thin aluminum foil tape.

Duck tape kind of sucks for most temporary applications as it leaves so much residue behind. Gaffer tape is an awesome replacement (although quite a bit pricier).

Re: Dt: Duck tape for your Unix pipes

#120

Post by john-radio »

mgaunard wrote: post #21

I either use Bash (which is actually a decent programming language if you spend the time to learn it properly) or Python.

I use Python's `fileinput.FileInput()` a lot for ad hoc scripts, because its behavior is to read from STDIN if available, or to attempt to open a file from `sys.argv[1]` (possibly `[1:]`?) if not, which covers a ton of this kind of use cases.
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