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That's understandable... but it usually takes a lot longer to calculate that cost than it does to tell you "don't do this, it's silly and would have all these p
by the_jeremy 6y ago
That's understandable... but it usually takes a lot longer to calculate that cost than it does to tell you "don't do this, it's silly and would have all these problems". I answer questions on bash/awk/sed in Stack Overflow. You can do a lot of things with those languages, but sometimes people think they know what they want ("how do I do this with 'cut'?") when they could do it much more easily with another utility (awk/sed).
- mjw1007 6y agoIn the special case of Stack Overflow, I think the overriding concern should be to make sure that the page with the title "How do I do foo with 'cut'" has, as its most visible response, a description of how to do foo with 'cut'. A note afterwards pointing the user to sed or awk is a fine thing, but the purpose of Stack Overflow is to be a curated database of questions and answers, not a support forum.