11 Mar
2020
11 Mar
'20
10:02 a.m.
On Wed, 11 Mar 2020, Dave Horsfall wrote:
I'm starting to think that if a utility requires
many options then perhaps
they ought to be split into filters (or at least environment variables); I
despair at how *ix is drifting from "one tool, one job" to "one size fits
all"...
The "ls" command for example really needs an option-ectomy; I find that I
don't really care about the exact number of bytes there are in a file as the
nearest KiB or MiB (or even GiB) is usually good enough, so I'd be happy if
"-h" was the default with some way to turn it off (yes, I know that it's
occasionally useful to add them all up in a column, but that won't tell you
how many media blocks are required).
Quickly now, without looking: which option shows unprintable characters in a
filename? Unless you use it regularly (in which case you have real problems)
you would have to look it up; I find that "ls ... | od -bc" to be quicker,
especially on filenames with trailing blanks etc (which "-B" won't show).
It would probably be interesting to define a simplified standard, because
yeesh, trying to implement even a command as basic as ls is just torture
(mainly because it basically requires putting all of "column" and most of
"sort" into it)!
I've never liked GNU's
"--bloody-long-option" convention as you still have to
look up which one does what, but I've never thought about that view; a lot of
long options still accept a single character (subject to feeping creaturism,
of course).
I'm still into the one-character switch thing, personally.
-uso.