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On a modern Unix-like OS, these tools aren’t as simple as they used to be in the 1970s. The man page for ls alone lists tens of options, corner cases and histor

On a modern Unix-like OS, these tools aren’t as simple as they used to be in the 1970s. The man page for ls alone lists tens of options, corner cases and historical cruft. If those tools were really composable, they wouldn’t need so many options hidden in their man pages.

csydas 3y ago
I don't agree with this conclusion on the number of flags for the GNU core utils relating to it's composability; the flags are natural advanced extensions of what the tool is meant to do, and even without the flags the tools are straight forward enough that the default execution likely will meet the requirements of even new users. From my own experience teaching newbies about bash, the only hard part about all the flags was getting newbies comfortable with ignoring them at first and just trusting that `ls` lists files in the current directory, `sed` let's you manipulate text in a smart way, `grep` finds things, and so on. Once they got that in their head and understood that the flags just allow very specific operations that you previously needed to write a lot more code for, most people got it pretty fast and could punch out quick shell scripts to help with their work. But the base commands without a slew of flags was still quite useful for these newbies. Again though, that's just my experience and it was fairly narrow in scope for accomplishing specific troubleshooting tasks, so that may factor into why I saw success here; I don't know if the people I taught further evolved their scripting skills past basic troubleshooting, though I am fairly confident these persons understand the "kitchen tools" nature of the GNU core utils as many ended up writing scripts on their own for situations we never discussed, and the scripts were pretty okay. Edit: Typo, changed Exceptions to Extensions in the first paragraph

csydas 3y ago

I don't agree with this conclusion on the number of flags for the GNU core utils relating to it's composability; the flags are natural advanced extensions of what the tool is meant to do, and even without the flags the tools are straight forward enough that the default execution likely will meet the requirements of even new users. From my own experience teaching newbies about bash, the only hard part about all the flags was getting newbies comfortable with ignoring them at first and just trusting that `ls` lists files in the current directory, `sed` let's you manipulate text in a smart way, `grep` finds things, and so on. Once they got that in their head and understood that the flags just allow very specific operations that you previously needed to write a lot more code for, most people got it pretty fast and could punch out quick shell scripts to help with their work. But the base commands without a slew of flags was still quite useful for these newbies. Again though, that's just my experience and it was fairly narrow in scope for accomplishing specific troubleshooting tasks, so that may factor into why I saw success here; I don't know if the people I taught further evolved their scripting skills past basic troubleshooting, though I am fairly confident these persons understand the "kitchen tools" nature of the GNU core utils as many ended up writing scripts on their own for situations we never discussed, and the scripts were pretty okay. Edit: Typo, changed Exceptions to Extensions in the first paragraph