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I feel like UNIX tools do this very well. Setting aside the random naming and inconsistent argument placing, most UNIX CLI tools have sensible default behavior
by addicted 6y ago
I feel like UNIX tools do this very well.
Setting aside the random naming and inconsistent argument placing, most UNIX CLI tools have sensible default behavior.
But you can man the tool and find a whole bunch of switches etc that offer up a lot of complexity.
The piping system similarly is brilliant. It’s a simple and easy way to make extremely complex workflows using simple tools, but you could spend your entire life never knowing about piping and still do just fine with the individual tools.
- frutiger 6y agoI am the biggest fan of Unix commandline tools but I think you vastly overestimate how universal unix pipes are. For example, if I asked you to guess (no reading man pages or trying commands out!) how `find(1)` interprets input supplied to `stdin`, what would your guess be? Comparing your guess with what you learn from the man pages is an indication of how inconsistent most of the classic Unix tools are.
- tonyarkles 6y ago> how `find(1)` interprets input supplied to `stdin`, what would your guess be? I'm on OS X here, and I can't find any info about this at all in the man pages! I'd never really thought much about it; usually find is the very start of the pipeline for me. I have run into the -print0 option before though when passing the output into xargs :)