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What programs are you thinking of? Maybe this is my sysadmin bias but about 90% of my UNIX tools usage is on config files...
by bandrami 10y ago
What programs are you thinking of? Maybe this is my sysadmin bias but about 90% of my UNIX tools usage is on config files...
- JdeBP 10y agoLet me suggest an incendiary example: systemd systemctl status wibble.service : Displays human-readable information, with colours, line drawings, and variable-length free-form text; that is exceedingly hard for a program to parse reliably. Contrast with systemctl show wibble.service : Outputs machine-readable information, in systemd's favourite form of a Windows INI file.
- bandrami 10y agoYikes. Makes me glad I run Slackware. Though I seem to recall from The Init Wars that it was precisely this quality of SystemD that made people lob the charge that it violated the "Unix philosophy"
- TeMPOraL 10y agols, ps, du, df, ... pretty much all CLI tools. The kind you use in scripts.
- bandrami 10y agoAll four of which users are enjoined, over and over again, not to try to parse the output of (particularly ls). That is, those are the tools specifically not meant to be connected by pipelines, but merely used for operator convenience.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago...But how do you extract that data otherwise?
- bandrami 10y agoInstead of ls, find. Instead of ps, you parse the nodes in the /proc filesystem that ps itself parses. Ditto the /sys filesystem and du/df.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWhen those tools were written, /sys and /proc didn't exist.