The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 1:44 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #315

necrotic_comp wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Goldman, the internal language Slang has spaces in variable names. It's insane at first glance and I got into an argument with my manager about why in the world this was acceptable, and he could give me no other answer than "this is the way it is". But when you realize that space isn't a valid separator between token, seeing things like "Class to Pull Info From Database::Extractor Tool" actually becomes much easie…

> I was on your side until I tried it, but it can actually be quite useful, esp. if everything is consistent. On my side? You cannot imagine how extreme one can be... If I had my way, programming languages would only allow single-letter variables and space would be the multiplication operator.

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #313

enriquto wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, any unicode character is OK on a filename, except maybe space and slash.

I don't think C0 or C1 controls should be allowed in filenames. Why allow them? And they potentially pose security issues. With some, admittedly somewhat obscure [1][2], terminal emulators, C0 and C1 controls can even be used to execute arbitrary code. You could say these terminal emulators are insecure, and you may well be right, but the fact is they exist. [1] See for example page 211 of https://static.zumasys.com/…

Post by pwdisswordfish2 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #38

gorgoiler wrote: post #21

Pipes are wonderful! In my opinion you can’t extol them by themselves. One has to bask in a fuller set of features that are so much greater than the sum of their parts, to feel the warmth of Unix: (1) everything is text (2) everything (ish) is a file (3) including pipes and fds (4) every piece of software is accessible as a file, invoked at the command line (5) ...with local arguments (6) ...and persistent globals in…

> (1) everything is text And lists are space-separated. Unless you want them to be newline-separated, or NUL-separated, which is controlled by an option that may or may not be present for the command you're invoking, and is spelled completely differently for each program. Or maybe you just quote spaces somehow, and good luck figuring out who is responsible for inserting quotes and who is responsible for removing them…

Post by 1MachineElf » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #176

1MachineElf wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going with the same theme, C itself was an innovation meant to fill the space between Assembler (in this context, "A") and B[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

That isn't really supported by the article you linked -- it describes C as an extension of B multiple times.

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #333

skissane wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think C0 or C1 controls should be allowed in filenames. Why allow them? And they potentially pose security issues. With some, admittedly somewhat obscure [1][2], terminal emulators, C0 and C1 controls can even be used to execute arbitrary code. You could say these terminal emulators are insecure, and you may well be right, but the fact is they exist. [1] See for example page 211 of https://static.zumasys.com/…

I agree. Personally I think the Linux kernel should have a compilation-time option to disallow various special characters in filenames such as ASCII control characters and colons, so users who want to maintain a sane system can give themselves the option to do so.