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I'm not big on applications, period. Activities should be decomposed (or at least decomposable) into individual actions that I can stitch together in the shell
by dllthomas 8y ago
I'm not big on applications, period. Activities should be decomposed (or at least decomposable) into individual actions that I can stitch together in the shell.
- zzo38computer 8y agoI agree, we can use the pipes to put them together. That is how I do such thing, and design these programs, at least. For example, one program is "playmod" which read a module music file from stdin, and write the raw audio data to stdout. The program "amigamml" is takes the MML code from stdin and write the module music file to stdout. And then, program "aplay" is playing the audio data from stdin on the speaker. Other example can be, "ls" to list files, "shuf" to put into a random order, and "xargs" to run another program for each one, and a shell script might then do "playmod" and "aplay", you can play the music at random!
- chrisseaton 8y agoAren’t those individual actions still applications? I don’t know what you mean?
- dllthomas 8y agoThere's a frequent (but by no means universal) distinction drawn between "applications" and "utilities". In the former case, you have repeated interaction with a single process, typically with some measure of "ownership" of its display port. On the other hand, a utility typically does a single thing, produces some output, and then exits.