I was today years old when I learned that GNU sort has a -h option. Which doesn't mean "help" but means "use human-friendly units."

Except I sort of derived its existence from first principles. Someone wanted a way to find disk hogs (they were on a Linux box), but also wanted SI units, and I said to myself, "self, doesn't that sound like exactly the sort of baroque and vaguely nauseating option that GNU would add to sort?" Turns out it is.

Well, I mean, the MacOS man page just says that -h is an extension to POSIX (yes, it's there on MacOS too), but I will eat a small hat of mine if it didn't come to sort via GNU.

Adam

On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 5:07 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 3:47 PM Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:

I wish shells didn't supoprt globbing, and that glob(1) would be a standalone
program still today. It would simplify much of the quoting issues if most
characters were just characters to the shell.

I like the way the rc shell works: globbing is done, but any word in single quotes suppresses all interpretation (double quote has no meaning)