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What man page are you reading? "man tar" is very informative. Also, try reading the full documentation at "info tar". Yes, I learned a lot of commands (includi
by pdkl95 11y ago
What man page are you reading? "man tar" is very informative. Also, try reading the full documentation at "info tar".
Yes, I learned a lot of commands (including tar) from the man & info pages. If you consider "man tar" to be confusing, good luck with some of the actual CS concepts that are far more confusing. Tool documentation is nothing compared to e.g. the complexity of paxos or the dry verbosity of RFC 2616.
> bash is a lesson in language design failure
Bourne Shell is one of the best languages I've ever used. Have you actually read "man bash"? Or are you cargo-culting shell like a lot of people do instead of actually learning the language?
Trying to learn modern computing without this background is like trying to learn physics without calculus. You may be able to skipping it in theory, but that will require skipping almost the entire history of the field.
- stevebmark 11y agoI have written many arguably complicated shell scripts. It is almost always a painful experience that involves things that are hard to look up because of terse and confusing syntax. There are plenty of examples. Dealing with executing commands with nested quotes (double and single) with file names with spaces, doing anything with arrays, [] vs [[]], the rules of subshells, loop syntax when dealing with space delimiter vs line break delimiter, the lengthy list of -flag if[[]] conditions, comparing strings to variables... when I say "design failure" it's completely from personal experience and frustration from trying to do simple tasks in bash and hitting confusing syntax wall after wall. I hope you are saying >"one of the best languages I've ever used" in an argumentative sense and not sincerely! Bash is obviously not capable of many things and seems limiting to choose as a favorite (main go to?) language.
- vacri 11y agoShell is a 'glue' language, not a 'be' language. It's for gluing things together, not for being something in it's own right. Though yes, it'd be a lot nicer if arrays in particular didn't suck so much in shell.