3 ms·
There's a lot of UNIX tools which are user-unfriendly, simply because they were designed not to be chatty. You can't use nls to pump a list of files into anothe
by wisty 15y ago
There's a lot of UNIX tools which are user-unfriendly, simply because they were designed not to be chatty. You can't use nls to pump a list of files into another script, which then uses the list of files to do something else useful. Chatty scripts can't be chained together.
Yet, controlling chatty output is something that is already done, with -v (verbosity) levels.
I wonder how much more usable UNIX would be, if -v was on by default, and there was some easy way to disable it when chaining tools.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoUsually `-v` is used to increase verbosity in traditional unix applications (ls, mv, cp, etc). Or maybe I'm missing your point.
- wisty 15y agoCorrected - "increase" -> "control". My point is, UNIX tools are designed to be easy to use by the expert (easy to chain), but hard for beginners (not chatty). There's also a lot of neglect towards giving users useful feedback, because feedback just doesn't happen by default, so why improve it?
- _delirium 15y agoSome distros do experiment with that, since it's relatively easy to ship some default aliases. For example, ls is often aliased to some combination of --color, -l, and -h.