24 Mar
2017
24 Mar
'17
10:46 p.m.
The current SCCS certainly takes subcommands, but I have no idea if it
started out that way.
ifconfig is more a set of flags than subcommands.
And don't get me started about dd - who wrote that anyway? Must have
been an IBM guy :)
dd breaks all the norms for using shell wildcard expansions. You can't
do: dd if=*.tar of=/dev/rmt/0cbn bs=128k
Assuming, of course, you only had one tar file you wanted to write to tape.
On 3/24/2017 11:42 AM, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
Lots of tools now seem to use this strategy:
there's some kind of wrapper which has its own set of commands (which in turn might
have further subcommands). So for instance
git remote add ...
is a two layer thing.
Without getting into an argument about whether that's a reasonable or
ideologically-correct approach, I was wondering what the early examples of this kind of
wrapper-command approach were. I think the first time I noticed it was CVS, which made
you say `cvs co ...` where RCS & SCCS had a bunch of individual commands (actually:
did SCCS?). But I think it's possible to argue that ifconfig was an earlier example
of the same thing. I was thinking about dd as well, but I don't think that's
the same: they're really options not commands I think.
Relatedly, does this style originate on some other OS?
--tim
(I realise that in the case of many of these things, particularly git, the wrapper is
just dispatching to other tools that do the werk: it's the command style I'm
interested in not how it's implemented.)