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The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

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Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#51

Post by fenwick67 »

Aaronstotle wrote: post #10
dodwer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an alt-right in-joke related to the incel subculture.

I wouldn't be so quick to say it's an alt-right joke. Plenty of my friends will describe something/someone as a Chad and it has nothing to do with incel/alt-right cultures. Are those kind of phrases thrown out in those circles? Yes, but that's more of the general meme/internet lingo as opposed to subscribing to an ideology.

"my friends say it all the time and they don't mean it that way" is not a super great justification for language...

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#52

Post by ecnahc515 »

ketanmaheshwari wrote: post #6

Unix pipelines are cool and I am all for it. In recent times however, I see that sometimes they are taken too far without realizing that each stage in the pipeline is a process and a debugging overhead in case something goes wrong. A case in point is this pipeline that I came across in the wild: TOKEN=$(kubectl describe secret -n kube-system $(kubectl get secrets -n kube-system | grep default | cut -f1 -d ' ') | grep…

This is a pretty bad example since kubectl can output JSON and using something like `jq` would have made it even simpler.

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#53

Post by gorgoiler »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #40
jcranmer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

God help you if your paths have spaces in them.

By “God” you may mean “libc”...

...if it was the 1970s. Nowadays we use Python etc for tools where it’s less acceptable for them to fall apart, though everything falls apart at some point, spaces or otherwise.

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#55

Post by goldenrhino »

fenwick67 wrote: post #51
Aaronstotle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so quick to say it's an alt-right joke. Plenty of my friends will describe something/someone as a Chad and it has nothing to do with incel/alt-right cultures. Are those kind of phrases thrown out in those circles? Yes, but that's more of the general meme/internet lingo as opposed to subscribing to an ideology.

"my friends say it all the time and they don't mean it that way" is not a super great justification for language...

Apparently describing hyper masculine traits as “Chad” in a tongue-in-cheek way is on par with racial slurs? I’m assuming that’s what you are insinuating. Get a grip.

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#56

Post by DiggyJohnson »

young_unixer wrote: post #23
salmo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people can go through a few stages of their shell-foo. The first involves a lot of single commands and temporary files. The second uses pipes, but only tacks on commands with no refactoring. The third would recognize that all the grep and cut should just be awk, that you can redirect the cumulative output of a control statement, that subprocesses and coroutines are your friend. We should all aspire to this. T…

My most complex use of the shell is defining aliases in .bashrc and have never felt the need to go further. Do you recommend learning all of that for someone like me? If so, what resource do you recommend?

I absolutely think a lot of people are in this position. I am just now slightly "farther along" path as described by OP,and I'm starting to see how it can be worth it as long as you're pursuing the new information in an actually useful context.

I definitely be interested in OP's answer. That sort of breakdown is often extremely valuable in any area of learning.

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#57

Post by the_af »

cowmix wrote: post #4

I use pipelines as much as the next guy but every time I see post praise how awesome they are, I'm reminded of the Unix Hater's Handbook. Their take on pipelines is pretty spot on too. http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

I think of the Unix Hater's Handbook as a kind of loving roast to Unix, that hackers of the time understood to be humorous (you know, how people complain about the tools they use every day, much like people would later complain endlessly about Windows) and which was widely misunderstood later to be a real scathing attack.

It hasn't aged very well, either. "Even today, the X server turns fast computers into dumb terminals" hasn't been true for at least a couple of decades...

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#58

Post by cat199 »

khimaros wrote: post #24
geophile wrote: post #5

I love pipelines. I don't know the elaborate sublanguages of find, awk, and others, to exploit them adequately. I also love Python, and would rather use Python than those sublanguages. I'm developing a shell based on these ideas: https://github.com/geophile/marcel .

The lispers/schemers in the audience may be interested in Rash https://docs.racket-lang.org/rash/index.html which lets you combine an sh-like language with any other Racket syntax.

also what I think is the 'original' in this domain, scsh

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#59

Post by code-faster »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #48
cowmix wrote: post #4

I use pipelines as much as the next guy but every time I see post praise how awesome they are, I'm reminded of the Unix Hater's Handbook. Their take on pipelines is pretty spot on too. http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

I mostly like what they wrote about pipes. I think the example of bloating they talked about in ls at the start of the shell programming section is a good example: if pipelines are so great, why have so many unix utilities felt the need to bloat? I think it a result of there being just a bit too much friction in building a pipeline. A good portion tends to be massaging text formats. The standard unix commands for doi…

It's less that pipelines are friction, they're really not.

It's more that people like building features and people don't like saying no to features.

The original unix guys had a rare culture that was happy to knock off unnecessary features.

Re: The Beauty of Unix Pipelines

#60

Post by nerdponx »

gorgoiler wrote: post #47
jcranmer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

To criticize sh semantics without acknowledging that C was always there when you needed something serious is a bit short sighted. There are two uses of the Unix “api”: [A] Long lived tools for other people to use. [B] Short lived tools one throws together oneself. The fact that most things work most of the time is why the shell works so well for B, and why it is indeed a poor choice for the sort of stable tools desig…

C was always there when you needed something serious

There is a world of stuff in between "I need relatively low-level memory management" and "I need a script to just glue some shit together".

For that we have Python and Perl and Ruby and Go, or even Rust.

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