4 ms·

I’ve actually found myself using these to get me much more proficient in the Shell overall. fd in particular is so much easier to use I find myself doing things

I’ve actually found myself using these to get me much more proficient in the Shell overall. fd in particular is so much easier to use I find myself doing things like: fd .log$ -x mv {} {.}.bak (Rename *.log to *.bak) Can I do that with xargs, awk, and find? Yes, but every time I have to look up the man page to at least one of them and it’s enough friction that I might just open it in finder if it’s a handful of files. Having some of these utilities around is a crutch that let me leverage the entire ecosystem much more when I don’t have it. And when I do log into a shared enviroment and don’t have my crutch, then it’s easy to fill in the missing puzzle piece because it’s one part that’s missing and I’ve got the rest of the environment down. Of course if all you do is shared environments I wouldn’t suggest these, but I would encourage people to use these to get more familiar with the CLI ecosystem.

rhizome 7y ago
bash/zsh: for f in *.log; do mv "$f" "${f/%log/bak}"; done a bit more generic, `for` loops and parameter expansion are good to know for proficiency, and also I dislike typing curly braces.
- rovr138 7y ago
  Hah, thankfully I refreshed. Was about to post something similar. No need for xargs, awk or find
- mtzet 7y ago
  This doesn't move files in subdirectories? Or am I missing something?
  - pfortuny 7y ago
    You are right, it does not. But the find command is not too complicated, or different from the one above.
    - dickeytk 7y ago
      find has awful ergonomics that are completely unlike any other common unix tool. I can never remember the syntax, how the flags work, or what order things need to be in. Let's use an example I just dug up of using find: To list and remove all regular files named core starting in the directory /prog that are larger than 500KB, enter: find /prog -type f -size +1000 -print -name core -exec rm {} \; OK first, how in the hell is 1000 == 500kb? Is that a bug in my example[0]? What does `-print` do exactly? And that backslash at the end? I have no clue what that signifies. I'm never going to remember this madness. I'd probably have resorted to writing a bash script in a file by now. But with fd it becomes manageable and memorable for future tasks: To list and remove all regular files named core starting in the directory /prog that are larger than 500KB, enter: fd --type=file --size=+500k ^core$ ./prog -x rm {} Now that's something that makes immediate sense even if you've never touched the tool before. Not to mention, it doesn't end up in my .git and other ignored directories. [0] https://kb.iu.edu/d/admm https://kb.iu.edu/d/admm
      - jovdg 7y ago
        While I agree that find has weird quirks to my liking, your example is not a great one. I would write the find as follows: `find /prog -type f -size +500k -name core -delete` Alternative: `find /prog -type f -size +500k -name core -exec rm -v {} +` For extra context: `-print` will just show you the results before `rm`'ing. When the command ends with `\;`, the command will be repeated for every match. If the command ends with `+`, the results are appended until max args is reached (and then repeated). This is not always possible, but when it is, it's way easier to use. Less calls to the command, but certainly useful when appending the command after an ssh command, which would mean any number of extra `\` to escape the original `\`...
        dickeytk 7y ago
        TIL, but that’s my point. If after many years of doing this and leading the development on one of the top utilities on homebrew I don’t immediately know the answer to these things, how could anyone. UX is FAR more important in the CLI than even on the web. Users don’t just have to be able to learn what they want to do, for these common tools they have to memorize it or they won’t use it. Minor things like the order of the flags and bits like having to escape the semicolon don’t just make it challenging. I would argue for 99% of users they make it impossible. In other words, I think 99% of users don’t know how to use this level of find and will never learn. That’s a problem and no amount of education is going to fix it. The tool itself is broken.
nebulous1 7y ago
You might like zsh if you haven't tried it. Has a builtin `zmv` that does this. Check out oh-my-zsh
- dickeytk 7y ago
  This suggestion is exactly why fd is so helpful. With zmv I can rename files in a directory. Great. But what if I want to count the number of total files within each directory? Create tarballs out of each directory? Rename files that contain the word "FOOBAR" in them? I can do this with fd and similar tools with slight modifications. With zmv I can rename files.
  - jdc 7y ago
    How do you rename files based on contents with fd?
    - dickeytk 7y ago
      I would use rg. My original point is not that fd is a do anything tool, it’s that fd and others are a much better replacements for find, grep, etc that when I want to do something complex they’re much better starting places.
  - nebulous1 7y ago
    Cool! zsh also does a few things other than renaming files.
jcranberry 7y ago
Doing this with find is only marginally more difficult. find . -name '*.txt' -exec rename .log .bak {} \; If your rename is prename by default you can use sed style replacement. Not to disagree with your overall point.

rhizome 7y ago

bash/zsh: for f in *.log; do mv "$f" "${f/%log/bak}"; done a bit more generic, `for` loops and parameter expansion are good to know for proficiency, and also I dislike typing curly braces.

rovr138 7y ago
Hah, thankfully I refreshed. Was about to post something similar. No need for xargs, awk or find
mtzet 7y ago
This doesn't move files in subdirectories? Or am I missing something?
- pfortuny 7y ago
  You are right, it does not. But the find command is not too complicated, or different from the one above.
  - dickeytk 7y ago
    find has awful ergonomics that are completely unlike any other common unix tool. I can never remember the syntax, how the flags work, or what order things need to be in. Let's use an example I just dug up of using find: To list and remove all regular files named core starting in the directory /prog that are larger than 500KB, enter: find /prog -type f -size +1000 -print -name core -exec rm {} \; OK first, how in the hell is 1000 == 500kb? Is that a bug in my example[0]? What does `-print` do exactly? And that backslash at the end? I have no clue what that signifies. I'm never going to remember this madness. I'd probably have resorted to writing a bash script in a file by now. But with fd it becomes manageable and memorable for future tasks: To list and remove all regular files named core starting in the directory /prog that are larger than 500KB, enter: fd --type=file --size=+500k ^core$ ./prog -x rm {} Now that's something that makes immediate sense even if you've never touched the tool before. Not to mention, it doesn't end up in my .git and other ignored directories. [0] https://kb.iu.edu/d/admm https://kb.iu.edu/d/admm
    - jovdg 7y ago
      While I agree that find has weird quirks to my liking, your example is not a great one. I would write the find as follows: `find /prog -type f -size +500k -name core -delete` Alternative: `find /prog -type f -size +500k -name core -exec rm -v {} +` For extra context: `-print` will just show you the results before `rm`'ing. When the command ends with `\;`, the command will be repeated for every match. If the command ends with `+`, the results are appended until max args is reached (and then repeated). This is not always possible, but when it is, it's way easier to use. Less calls to the command, but certainly useful when appending the command after an ssh command, which would mean any number of extra `\` to escape the original `\`...
      - dickeytk 7y ago
        TIL, but that’s my point. If after many years of doing this and leading the development on one of the top utilities on homebrew I don’t immediately know the answer to these things, how could anyone. UX is FAR more important in the CLI than even on the web. Users don’t just have to be able to learn what they want to do, for these common tools they have to memorize it or they won’t use it. Minor things like the order of the flags and bits like having to escape the semicolon don’t just make it challenging. I would argue for 99% of users they make it impossible. In other words, I think 99% of users don’t know how to use this level of find and will never learn. That’s a problem and no amount of education is going to fix it. The tool itself is broken.

nebulous1 7y ago

You might like zsh if you haven't tried it. Has a builtin `zmv` that does this. Check out oh-my-zsh

dickeytk 7y ago
This suggestion is exactly why fd is so helpful. With zmv I can rename files in a directory. Great. But what if I want to count the number of total files within each directory? Create tarballs out of each directory? Rename files that contain the word "FOOBAR" in them? I can do this with fd and similar tools with slight modifications. With zmv I can rename files.
- jdc 7y ago
  How do you rename files based on contents with fd?
  - dickeytk 7y ago
    I would use rg. My original point is not that fd is a do anything tool, it’s that fd and others are a much better replacements for find, grep, etc that when I want to do something complex they’re much better starting places.
- nebulous1 7y ago
  Cool! zsh also does a few things other than renaming files.

jcranberry 7y ago

Doing this with find is only marginally more difficult. find . -name '*.txt' -exec rename .log .bak {} \; If your rename is prename by default you can use sed style replacement. Not to disagree with your overall point.