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Totally agree. The article doesn't show deep understanding of the actual problems. - make's TAB "problem" as very first argument is not very convincing. - The

Totally agree. The article doesn't show deep understanding of the actual problems. - make's TAB "problem" as very first argument is not very convincing. - The citations to back up the claim that a (possibly binary) registry database was better than small text files are just not backing up. There is nothing to defend a registry there. The quote is about fsync semantics which has nothing to do with registry. Btw. in my perception it's a widely accepted fact that a big-pile-of-crap database is a bad idea. And oh, I haven't ever heard of any problem with passwd/group/shadow/gshadow being text files. And if there were, the access method is actually abstracted away, it's easy to switch backends to something else (NSS). (there is a problem with these files though -- they are denormalized, and not all fields have clear meaning and some programs interpret some fields in weird ways.). - Zombie processes. What's the problem there? They are just like file handles. Handles have to be closed before they are garbage collected. The actual problem is that you can't really "open" and "close" processes, only spawn new childs and the resulting hierarchy is not typically desired. - "We call touch in the loop! This means there is a new process for each file. This is extremely inefficient." Yeah and why exactly is the shell to blame that you use touch in a loop? (apart from the fact that it's almost certainly not a problem). Could go on but have to leave...

paulddraper 10y ago
To quote the author > We call touch in the loop here (I do know that the code can be re-written with xargs, so that touch is called only once; but let’s forget about it for now, okay?)...This means there is a new process for each file. This is extremely inefficient. Code in any other programming language will work faster than this one. WHAT THE HELL??? Did he just criticize Unix/POSIX for its inefficiency after willfully choosing a less efficient way? He wrote find foo -print0 | while IFS="" read -rd "" A; do touch -- "$A"; done When we could have written the very fast and very readable and very simple find foo -print0 | xargs -0 touch -- I'll put this up against the equivalent implementation in any language you choose.

paulddraper 10y ago

To quote the author > We call touch in the loop here (I do know that the code can be re-written with xargs, so that touch is called only once; but let’s forget about it for now, okay?)...This means there is a new process for each file. This is extremely inefficient. Code in any other programming language will work faster than this one. WHAT THE HELL??? Did he just criticize Unix/POSIX for its inefficiency after willfully choosing a less efficient way? He wrote find foo -print0 | while IFS="" read -rd "" A; do touch -- "$A"; done When we could have written the very fast and very readable and very simple find foo -print0 | xargs -0 touch -- I'll put this up against the equivalent implementation in any language you choose.