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Yes, most of us would probably have to check the manpage for three or four of these utility programs to put together something like Rob McIlroy's one-liner from

by pm215 8y ago

Yes, most of us would probably have to check the manpage for three or four of these utility programs to put together something like Rob McIlroy's one-liner from the article. I think this is clearly still more efficient than writing 17 pages worth of code in a general purpose language, which is what it's being pitted against. I also don't think it's really a very high hurdle -- if I were writing the same thing in a Python or Perl script I bet I would end up also consulting the documentation to check exactly how to do things or what some detail of syntax is. If you happen to write Python all day every day then sure, you'll find it much faster to just write a quick Python script for this sort of thing. If your day job is C or Java or some other non-scripting language and this is a once-a-month-or-so task then I think the time required to do this sort of small utility task in shell-and-utility-tools is not really any different to remembering how to write Perl scripts.

pfranz 8y ago
I do see what they're saying though. I've used Linux for the most part of 20 years. My primary job has hopped between Perl, Python, and a bunch of other languages, but bash/csh has been fairly consistent. I took a job using Windows for a year or two and tried really hard to get familiar and proficient in PowerShell. Since my job was primarily in Python, learning PowerShell had a steep learning curve with a lot of time between uses. I clung to Python. I jumped to WSL/Ubuntu (and honestly sshed into Linux vms before that) because I was so familiar with it. If I stayed at that job (or another Windows job) I probably would have eventually picked up PowerShell, but that would probably have taken 5 years.
jamesgeck0 8y ago
The 17 pages comment gets me. Literate programming is verbose by design. I'd be surprised if the Ruby version of that script was much longer than the command line version.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
And, it's also faster/easier to copy and paste a command from the internet than to download, install, and run a standard program. Probably not the most security-conscious thing, but it gets the job done. Furthermore, it's often quite easy to slightly tweak a command I found online, even if I don't understand much of it.

by pm215 8y ago

pfranz 8y ago

I do see what they're saying though. I've used Linux for the most part of 20 years. My primary job has hopped between Perl, Python, and a bunch of other languages, but bash/csh has been fairly consistent. I took a job using Windows for a year or two and tried really hard to get familiar and proficient in PowerShell. Since my job was primarily in Python, learning PowerShell had a steep learning curve with a lot of time between uses. I clung to Python. I jumped to WSL/Ubuntu (and honestly sshed into Linux vms before that) because I was so familiar with it. If I stayed at that job (or another Windows job) I probably would have eventually picked up PowerShell, but that would probably have taken 5 years.

jamesgeck0 8y ago

The 17 pages comment gets me. Literate programming is verbose by design. I'd be surprised if the Ruby version of that script was much longer than the command line version.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

And, it's also faster/easier to copy and paste a command from the internet than to download, install, and run a standard program. Probably not the most security-conscious thing, but it gets the job done. Furthermore, it's often quite easy to slightly tweak a command I found online, even if I don't understand much of it.