6 May
2017
6 May
'17
12:56 a.m.
On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 4, 2017, at 19:14, Larry McVoy wrote:
have you been using powershell lately? it makes things like this
rather enjoyable. yes, powershell is open source, and yes, it's been
ported to linux, but i think unix needs its own home-grown "object
oriented shell".
<snip>
On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 03:59:22PM +0100, Tim
Bradshaw wrote:
> On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving
flags."
>
> And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some
of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those
for cat) were really quite useful. I remember spending really a long time finding and
building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early
SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.
I mean, there's a legitimate argument that some of them would have been
just as useful or more as separate utilities than as flags. But to some
extent the fully generalized version seems questionable.
I mean, to apply the design philosophy to, say, ls -t (nevermind that
this particular flag has in fact existed since Unix V1, it's exactly the
*kind* of thing that should prompt someone who is consistently applying
Pike's idea of the unix philosophy to say "sorting should be the sort
tool"), you would have to have A) a basic "ls" command which does all
the filesystem-accessing work and prints timestamps and all other
relevant output in a format that can be sorted lexicographically, B) run
it through sort(1), C) a command [or maybe an awk script] that will pare
it back down to the usual human-readable formats (names only, ls -l, or
maybe a timestamp-and-name format, with human-friendly timestamps). And
then D) another tool to sort it into columns.