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NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

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Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#131

Post by Symbiote »

Arnavion wrote: post #119
maho wrote: post #58

My number-one wish for a NGS: Undo! Take, for example, rm. The hoops we have to jump through when accidentally rm'ing a file are ridiculous [1]. But in most cases (smallish, non-secret files), rm should be trivially undoable. Windows gets this right: By default, files are not deleted, but moved to trash. If there is not enough space in trash, Windows warns you. Or, if you really want to delete a file instead of movin…

>Windows gets this right: By default, files are not deleted, but moved to trash. The del or Remove-Item commands also permanently delete the file, just like rm. The "Windows" behavior you're talking about is the behavior of the graphical shell Explorer, which is also present in Gnome and KDE. There's nothing specific to Windows here.

  apt install trash-cli
  alias rm=trash
Done? This implements the Freedesktop specification, so is compatible with what KDE and Gnome do.

https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#132

Post by kkirsche »

js2 wrote: post #73
heydonovan wrote: post #9

I'm sure we can all agree that the current state of shells needs some work, but I don't think inventing a new one is the right solution. I'm a huge fan of the fish shell, but in the real world, it never seems to be installed across the farm, and convincing the older SysAdmins to install it is more trouble than it's worth. We should be focusing on saner bash defaults, since it's the most common shell in use. We should…

older SysAdmins I hope you aren't referring to their age, in which case consider using a different adjective: experienced, seasoned, wiser, etc. Your colleagues probably don't want to install fish shell for reasons besides how old they are.

This to me makes too many assumptions. I'm sorry but experience doesn't mean wise. And in many cases experience can mean complacent or scared of change.

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#133

Post by nailer »

tacos wrote: post #113
nailer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Javascript is not the most popular language > does not have the largest package library, which is what I think you mean. Yes, you've said that before. Do you have any supporting arguments? I'm basing that opinion on: 1. JS is #1 on modulecount and #2 on libraries.io, the two places that track the size of package repositories. 2. JS continually coming up as the #1 or #2 most popular language on StackOverflow eg http…

And the most popular girl in my high school can't ride a motorcyle. I took her to prom but I'm not inviting her on my next cross-country ride. What's your point? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_programming_language... Regardless you don't pick a toolset based on popularity. You choose it based on capability. 100,000 front-end HTML developers asking the same "how do I regex?" question on StackOverflow 10,000 t…

My point is that while you keep saying something is wrong, the evidence shows otherwise.

I'm pretty sure you're already aware of that. Your account is new, perhaps you've been here before but you don't seem very capable of participating in technical discussions. I'm going to end this conversion for obvious reasons.

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#134

Post by iheartmemcache »

MichaelGG wrote: post #127
iheartmemcache wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using -nix for almost 20 years. I've used everything from ksh on SunOS 2.6 (Solaris?? what's that) to oh-my-zsh (for 3 years, before happily graduating to oh-my-fish). I grew up on Slackware 6 waiting hours and hours for a 2.2 kernel build to finish. In high school, FreeBSD 4.3 kernel mods took up more time than booze and women. My 3 year puppy love for oh-my-zsh dimmed as I transitioned to a more sane, les…

Powershell's almost great. Things are way too verbose. No built-in stuff like curl or wget (yes, there's a simple webrequest thing and aliases, but they're clunky). In fact, it feels like everything in PS is clunky. Just simple stuff like "time ./foo" becomes "Measure-Command {... }" and then it prints out 10 lines of the same measurement, in different units. And doesn't distinguish CPU time versus wall time. All tha…

Yeah, for things like that, I have a wrapper function and/or aliases which get loaded with PowerShell. The over-verbosity I'd imagine really helps the "click next-get cheques" guys who are a little intimidated by the command-line. (I on the otherhand bleed Hayes 9600 baud and VT220 green cold cathode.). 'ps aux' wouldn't really cut it. Just like one customizes their bash, fish, zsh or whatever shell, you customize your PS shell with modules (the Powershell Community Extensions (PSCX)) and other such things (SQL Server integration with Powershell? Yes please!).

So you effectively can do t foo, which your alias to a wrapper script around Measure-Command and get the same effect. But, wait, you also want to log the outputs, just to keep track of the progress as you refine the memory allocation on my_malloc.cc. Pop into ISE[1] stock with Windows 8+ (or your favorite Powershell editor) add a few lines and now you can have a log that associates each revision with it's performance. Keep it open like you would your editor and your .bashrc or .zshrc or whatnot.

The great thing about that is I only have to write the verbose command once and it's entirely clear what that command does. I can share it with anyone and they can run it, assuming they have .NET 4 or higher. They know immediately what it does.

RE: Other software - All the unix utils (grep, awk, etc) are in a downloadable "Gow". Windows has a package manager "chocolatey" which is basically like the apt repos. All the software is vetted. Heavily. They run every binary through VirusTotal which is 57 engines from the enterprise Sophos type stuff to the less-good-ones.

I've run into one bug in 18 months (multiple python installs 2.7.1 / 3.4.x + the env var of PythonHome conflicting references. I'm sure there's a solution but I don't care enough about python to research it).

[1] https://i.imgur.com/dXmT2MX.png

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#135

Post by kkirsche »

voidz wrote: post #4

A shell is an application that provides system interaction to users. > What I see is a void. There is no good language for system tasks (and no good shell). What's near this void is outdated shells on one hand and generic (non-DSL) programming languages on the other. Both are being (ab)used for system tasks. Aside from the, in my opinion, abhorrent word "outdated" (why are old things considered bad just because of th…

By and large I agree. As a programmer, I generally feel like the sysadmins which I work with "hide" how they do things and aren't transparent enough about their role for me to know why I should respect them. I've seen some do amazing things and then I recognize the difficulty but I don't feel their is enough collaboration between the two sides

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#136

Post by Amezarak »

MichaelGG wrote: post #127
iheartmemcache wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using -nix for almost 20 years. I've used everything from ksh on SunOS 2.6 (Solaris?? what's that) to oh-my-zsh (for 3 years, before happily graduating to oh-my-fish). I grew up on Slackware 6 waiting hours and hours for a 2.2 kernel build to finish. In high school, FreeBSD 4.3 kernel mods took up more time than booze and women. My 3 year puppy love for oh-my-zsh dimmed as I transitioned to a more sane, les…

Powershell's almost great. Things are way too verbose. No built-in stuff like curl or wget (yes, there's a simple webrequest thing and aliases, but they're clunky). In fact, it feels like everything in PS is clunky. Just simple stuff like "time ./foo" becomes "Measure-Command {... }" and then it prints out 10 lines of the same measurement, in different units. And doesn't distinguish CPU time versus wall time. All tha…

> No built-in stuff like curl or wget (yes, there's a simple webrequest thing and aliases, but they're clunky).

wget is a built-in alias in Powershell. 'Wget' alone gets you an object of course, with the status code, headets, etc. included. (wget http://google.com).Content gets you the content.

Seems about the same as basic uses of wget. Can you go into more detail?

The verbosity doesn't bother me too much personally: it saves me a lot of time remembering commands and there's tab completion, and of course there's aliases.

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#137

Post by Symbiote »

kps wrote: post #102
CJefferson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, I need to remember to do that. How about (for example): $ for i in $(ls | grep 'cheese\|fish' | head -n 5) ... I'm sure there is a way to make this work correctly (take 5 filenames containing either cheese or fish), but I'd need to put more thought into making it work correctly.

ls | grep 'cheese\|fish' | head -n 5 | while read -r i …

With Zsh:

  > touch {dark\ red,green,light\ blue}{cheese,fish\ fingers,fruit}
  > ls -1 *(cheese|fish)*([1,5])
  dark redcheese
  dark redfish fingers
  greencheese
  greenfish fingers
  light bluecheese
  > for i in *(cheese|fish)*([1,5]) ...
Since that's shell globbing, it can cope with any spaces, newlines etc.

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#138

Post by Tiksi »

chriswarbo wrote: post #93
dumbguy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use tmux. It'll take a day to figure out, and then all your problems go away. Well, save the spaces, that's never going to happen.

> all your problems go away. Well, save the spaces, that's never going to happen. Spaces in filenames are fine. The only strange thing is that, as it turns out, shells have this hidden easter-egg/anti-feature where you can actually leave out the quotes around filenames under certain, special edge-case scenarios. One of those is when the filename contains no ampersands, quotation marks, asterisks, dollar-signs, parent…

You could use a shell that magically handles all the escaping for you either while typing/pasting for some programs (curl, grep etc) when not in quotes and tab completes with a selector so you don't have to think about spaces, special chars, etc:

http://paste.click/VfUUWv

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#139

Post by vox_mollis »

leephillips wrote: post #125
vox_mollis wrote: post #98

[WARNING, RANTY] This is a blue-sky project. Completely new, with no legacy dependencies. AND YET THE DEVELOPER CHOSE TO WRITE IT IN C. WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY? Could someone explain this to me? Is it developer hubris, believing in one's own infallibility that a single exploitable stack frame or buffer overflow couldn't possibly happen "on my watch"? If you need a native binary, your options are endless. Rust, G…

Do you think it's a bad idea that git and the Linux kernel are written in C? Is the possibility of a buffer overflow important in a program that's not processing input from random people on the internet?

No, because they are both legacy software. I understand momentum in codebases - that's why I'm reserving my vitriol for fresh bluesky projects like this one.

As for exploitability, privilege escalation and shellcode injection is still very much a thing, internet-facing or not.

Re: NGS: Next Generation Unix Shell

#140

Post by zyxley »

lfowles wrote: post #101
nailer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because fish is a better version of existing shells. It's not significantly different to throw away what we have. Sane syntax and proper colors and better autocomplete make it better than bash, but not enough to throw away the network effects of bash. Think of hg trying to compete with git - it might be better, but it's not better enough . As a shell person (I'm the maintainer of https://certsimple.com/rosetta…

Personally, I use fish as my interactive shell. Bash still exists in the background for purposes of _the whole world runs on it_.

Same here.
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