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I do not want -z at all, ever; -z has no business in a tape archiver, as it goes against the core UNIX philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" [McIlroy].
by Annatar 10y ago
I do not want -z at all, ever; -z has no business in a tape archiver, as it goes against the core UNIX philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" [McIlroy].
Implementing UNIX tools inside of other UNIX tools is not how UNIX works; that might be acceptable on Windows, but it sucks on UNIX.
For example,
xz -dvc archive.tar.xz | tar xf -
works everywhere as is, including Linux, while
tar xzf archive.tar.xz
will not work on systems which do not use GNU tar or where GNU tar is not linked with libz, libarchive and liblzma.
GNU way is broken, because it is the Windows way, and Windows is busted.
- schoen 10y agoAnother example might be "sort -u" (because you can get the same result from "sort | uniq"). There seems to have been a pattern where people decided that if "foo | bar" (or "bar | foo") is a common enough idiom, they could or should create "foo -b" to mimic it.
- justinsaccount 10y agoExcept that `sort -u` enables an optimization for dealing with a large number of duplicate lines.