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Sir, you are absolutely and totally wrong. No sysadmin has time or interest to write programs or use "proper programming languages" to get the job done. Sysadmi

Sir, you are absolutely and totally wrong. No sysadmin has time or interest to write programs or use "proper programming languages" to get the job done. Sysadmins know their tools and are fast and efficient. Zero sysadmins will ever write "proper programs" when they can pipe find, sed, and awk.

ccalloway 5y ago
Yes, but the number of sysadmins in the world is converging rapidly to zero. Mainly because the invisible overhead of having your boxes managed by people who use sed and awk is much higher than the alternatives (containerisation, cloud vendors, cattle not pets, infrastructure as code). I think you actually confirmed my point when you said 'no sysadmin has time or interest'. I didn't say that no one uses shell anymore. I said that there was no practical justification for doing so. Lots of people still use it and don't have any interest in finding a better solution. These people are choosing, for their own reasons, to double down on an obsolete skillset. Good for them, I suppose, but I don't think that demand for their niche is going to be around for very long. I also pointed out that sysadmins who know what they're doing use awk. Based on your mentioning awk it seems like you agree with this.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  >containerisation, cloud vendors, cattle not pets, infrastructure as code Lots of shell script in that part of the code world.
- ozim 5y ago
  I care to disagree because you just move one abstraction layer higher and again you will use sed and awk. To move stuff to that cattle and to maintain cloud environments, to prepare k8s clusters and manage those. To create docker images or to maintain servers that are running k8s. You still have AWS console and Azure CLI or GCP console and configurations that need to be search/replaced. You still need to parse logs to understand what is happening in multiple environments, which I would say makes it even more important to be good with unix-fu because you have to find that one broken cow to put it out of misery. Those command line tools are still useful and used.
  - ccalloway 5y ago
    Did you read or understand my original comment? I specifically named awk as a way of solving these type of problems that has a similar applicability and maturity to a scripting language. My real objection is to long chains of cut, head, cat, grep, and so on. I also think that utilities like jq and xargs, which were invented exactly to allow people to do things in shell one-liners which are trivial in a proper language, are worse than useless. I didn't say that no one should use awk, or no one should use the command line. In fact I didn't say that no one should use pipes with head, cut and grep either. I just said that most reasons to use them were no longer valid.
- turtlebits 5y ago
  You don't need to be a sysadmin to take advantage of CLI tools. Anyone that needs to manage files and/or the contents of them can benefit.
unixbane 5y ago
> Sysadmins know their tools This is false. Every line they write has potential security implications. If any pattern can become a string injection vulnerability, it will. Even most real programmers do not understand shell scripting. This discussion is all moot because UN*X is an obsolete misconception made by programmers who are too dumb to understand the difference between and significance of AST manipulation and string concatenation. It's not hard to understand what I'm talking about. Look how much ad-hoc, non-reusable trivia you have to learn to pass stuff around between find, ls, and xargs. Whenever you would do `x = f(); g(x)` in Python, you will spend 10 minutes figuring out if some given shell script is doing the equivalent the correct, safe, secure way. I just realized today that every time I see some crap like x,abc%%20%%20def,y x,abc\x20\x20def,y I am actually depressed because I already know all the played out meta of such systems - it's a bunch of half working junk full of pointless vulns that only exist because between 0 and 10 of the said "experts at their craft" in the world actually bother to program this crap correctly. And I literaly have to squint to figure out where the bug is (there's always the bug in such code). If the UN*X shell was replaced by Python, sysadmins would have no trouble adapting. Python is a terrible language, (plus this discussion is convoluted by the fact that Python's gimped from bending over to work well with UN*X) but still better than UN*X shell in every way.
- deleted 5y ago
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ccalloway 5y ago

Yes, but the number of sysadmins in the world is converging rapidly to zero. Mainly because the invisible overhead of having your boxes managed by people who use sed and awk is much higher than the alternatives (containerisation, cloud vendors, cattle not pets, infrastructure as code). I think you actually confirmed my point when you said 'no sysadmin has time or interest'. I didn't say that no one uses shell anymore. I said that there was no practical justification for doing so. Lots of people still use it and don't have any interest in finding a better solution. These people are choosing, for their own reasons, to double down on an obsolete skillset. Good for them, I suppose, but I don't think that demand for their niche is going to be around for very long. I also pointed out that sysadmins who know what they're doing use awk. Based on your mentioning awk it seems like you agree with this.

DarylZero 5y ago
>containerisation, cloud vendors, cattle not pets, infrastructure as code Lots of shell script in that part of the code world.
ozim 5y ago
I care to disagree because you just move one abstraction layer higher and again you will use sed and awk. To move stuff to that cattle and to maintain cloud environments, to prepare k8s clusters and manage those. To create docker images or to maintain servers that are running k8s. You still have AWS console and Azure CLI or GCP console and configurations that need to be search/replaced. You still need to parse logs to understand what is happening in multiple environments, which I would say makes it even more important to be good with unix-fu because you have to find that one broken cow to put it out of misery. Those command line tools are still useful and used.
- ccalloway 5y ago
  Did you read or understand my original comment? I specifically named awk as a way of solving these type of problems that has a similar applicability and maturity to a scripting language. My real objection is to long chains of cut, head, cat, grep, and so on. I also think that utilities like jq and xargs, which were invented exactly to allow people to do things in shell one-liners which are trivial in a proper language, are worse than useless. I didn't say that no one should use awk, or no one should use the command line. In fact I didn't say that no one should use pipes with head, cut and grep either. I just said that most reasons to use them were no longer valid.
turtlebits 5y ago
You don't need to be a sysadmin to take advantage of CLI tools. Anyone that needs to manage files and/or the contents of them can benefit.

unixbane 5y ago

> Sysadmins know their tools This is false. Every line they write has potential security implications. If any pattern can become a string injection vulnerability, it will. Even most real programmers do not understand shell scripting. This discussion is all moot because UN*X is an obsolete misconception made by programmers who are too dumb to understand the difference between and significance of AST manipulation and string concatenation. It's not hard to understand what I'm talking about. Look how much ad-hoc, non-reusable trivia you have to learn to pass stuff around between find, ls, and xargs. Whenever you would do `x = f(); g(x)` in Python, you will spend 10 minutes figuring out if some given shell script is doing the equivalent the correct, safe, secure way. I just realized today that every time I see some crap like x,abc%%20%%20def,y x,abc\x20\x20def,y I am actually depressed because I already know all the played out meta of such systems - it's a bunch of half working junk full of pointless vulns that only exist because between 0 and 10 of the said "experts at their craft" in the world actually bother to program this crap correctly. And I literaly have to squint to figure out where the bug is (there's always the bug in such code). If the UN*X shell was replaced by Python, sysadmins would have no trouble adapting. Python is a terrible language, (plus this discussion is convoluted by the fact that Python's gimped from bending over to work well with UN*X) but still better than UN*X shell in every way.

deleted 5y ago
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