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Debian's Which Hunt

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Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#251

Post by dangerface »

na85 wrote: post #149
pdimitar wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved on from Debian some 9-10 years ago and I haven't regretted it once. Many sysadmin acquaintances and former colleagues of mine complained that upgrading Debian is often like rolling a dice (yes, even the stable and thus fairly old variant). An innocent "apt-get upgrade" moves configuration files and/or expectations where they are, or, what's even worse, changes the config files and silently moves the previous…

>or, what's even worse, changes the config files and silently moves the previous ones to another file. I run Debian on my servers because I like not having to wrestle with Yast2 or deal with the constant churn for churn's sake of certain RPM-based distros. The above quote hasn't really been a thing since at least Debian 8, and possibly 7. Certainly when it came time to upgrade to 11, if package configs were being ove…

My Debian 10 box updated last week and now its down. Its probably just a config file has changed but no mail for me till I get it fixed. Centos never had this issue I wish it was still a thing so I dont have to use Debian

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#252

Post by MonkeyClub »

coolgeek wrote: post #245
denton-scratch wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know about the "help" command in bash. I've always gone to "man bash", and then scrolled up and down for an hour or so. Or just cranked-up a search engine. So thanks for that.

Apparently, there's an "info" command, as well

Though info isn't POSIX compliant.

Not to mention that most distributions completely ignore it and don't populate it with a program's info documentation -- even when such exists.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#253

Post by creativemonkeys »

kelnos wrote: post #152

> * The POSIX-blessed way of finding an executable program is command -v, which is consequently built into most shells. Given the standard alternative, Adams said, "surely no one competent would choose to have a package depend on `which` when a standard POSIX utility can do a better job".* This feels a little tone-deaf to me. I've been using the *nix command-line and writing (and reading) shell scripts for 20+ years,…

Once I tried to use `which` in cross-platform scripts, all sorts of issues crept up.

The output and return result differ significantly between BSD, GNU and OSX, so you can't just run $(which python) and get a straightforward response back.

Granted, I didn't know about `command -v` so I'm not sure if it works better in practice.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#254

Post by egberts1 »

also - ‘which’, being too Debian-specific, will not return the filespec if its file permission is too restrictive.

- ‘command -v’, also will not display binary if its file permission is too restrictive.

- ‘whereis -b’ works just fine as long as /usr/sbin has world RX file mode or other lesser matching filemods.

Still stuck on ‘whereis’

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#255

Post by nijave »

soraminazuki wrote: post #192
sneak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, POSIX is basically irrelevant now. There are only two Unixen that anyone uses: RMS/Linux and whatever outdated garbage userspace Apple is shipping with macOS.

> whatever outdated garbage userspace Apple is shipping with macOS Is that a criticism of the FreeBSD userspace? Because that's where much of Apple's UNIX userspace is derived from, and they're regularly synced with upstream.

How much of macOS is actually still upstream BSD. I was under the impression they were slowly ripping it all out and replacing it (launchd, different logging subsystem, different file paths/directories)

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#256

Post by greyfade »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #252
coolgeek wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, there's an "info" command, as well

Though info isn't POSIX compliant. Not to mention that most distributions completely ignore it and don't populate it with a program's info documentation -- even when such exists.

Neither is Bash.

And, being GNU projects, Bash and `info` generally come hand-in-hand.

Re: Debian's Which Hunt

#257

Post by soraminazuki »

nijave wrote: post #255
soraminazuki wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whatever outdated garbage userspace Apple is shipping with macOS Is that a criticism of the FreeBSD userspace? Because that's where much of Apple's UNIX userspace is derived from, and they're regularly synced with upstream.

How much of macOS is actually still upstream BSD. I was under the impression they were slowly ripping it all out and replacing it (launchd, different logging subsystem, different file paths/directories)

I assume the parent is referring to command line utilities like sed, awk, and coreutils. The examples you're referring to are Apple's own software and not forks, so it'd be weird to call them "outdated."
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