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While I agree with the larger sentiment I think you’re making (I also make it a habit to peruse the manual just to see what is available), how often do you rere

by latexr 2y ago

While I agree with the larger sentiment I think you’re making (I also make it a habit to peruse the manual just to see what is available), how often do you reread the manual, especially for your shell? I knew about associative arrays in bash, but not by reading the manual as those were introduced in v4 and I’ve been using bash for longer than that.

teddyh 2y ago
You should probably read the release notes for new major versions. Also, anytime you think “I wish there was <feature> available in this program”, you should probably double-check if such a feature has appeared since you last learned the program.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  That's how I discovered the '&' regex feature in less some years back.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    Do you mean PCRE’s “(?&name)” feature? That is not portable; for instance, Python calls it “(?P=name)”. Or do you mean the common feature of “&” in the replacement string meaning “the whole matched string”? While this feature is common in languages which use regexps (including ed, sed, awk, etc.), that’s not actually a regexp feature, since the & character has that effect in the replacement string, not in the regular expression. It is also not always portable; for instance, Emacs requires escaping as \& for the character to have the special feature.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      From man(1) less: &pattern Display only lines which match the pattern; lines which do not match the pattern are not displayed. If pattern is empty (if you type & immediately followed by ENTER), any filtering is turned off, and all lines are displayed. While filtering is in effect, an ampersand is displayed at the beginning of the prompt, as a reminder that some lines in the file may be hidden. $ less --version less 487 (GNU regular expressions) Copyright (C) 1984-2016 Mark Nudelman
      - teddyh 2y ago
        Oh, you meant the program “less”! Right, I understand what you meant now.
        dredmorbius 2y ago
        :-) Yeah. I was viewing some files and thinking "it'd be really cool if less(1) had some way of filtering to just lines matching a specific pattern". RTFM'd and TIL'd. Mind that at that point I'd used less for ... oh, at least 30 years.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Agreed. This is also how I found out that features in Python I took for granted, like breakpoint(), were much more recent than I thought (3.7). Nothing like having to use ancient versions of a language to discover limitations.
akvadrako 2y ago
I do a fair bit of bash scripting and there is no way I can remember all the features and syntax I use, so of course I read parts of the manual regularly and often learn new things. You don't need to ever read the whole thing.
sgarland 2y ago
I once worked with a dev (frontend, of all things) who reread the bash manual annually. I work in ops, and I don’t even have that dedication. My hat is off to them.

by latexr 2y ago

teddyh 2y ago

You should probably read the release notes for new major versions. Also, anytime you think “I wish there was <feature> available in this program”, you should probably double-check if such a feature has appeared since you last learned the program.

dredmorbius 2y ago
That's how I discovered the '&' regex feature in less some years back.
- teddyh 2y ago
  Do you mean PCRE’s “(?&name)” feature? That is not portable; for instance, Python calls it “(?P=name)”. Or do you mean the common feature of “&” in the replacement string meaning “the whole matched string”? While this feature is common in languages which use regexps (including ed, sed, awk, etc.), that’s not actually a regexp feature, since the & character has that effect in the replacement string, not in the regular expression. It is also not always portable; for instance, Emacs requires escaping as \& for the character to have the special feature.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    From man(1) less: &pattern Display only lines which match the pattern; lines which do not match the pattern are not displayed. If pattern is empty (if you type & immediately followed by ENTER), any filtering is turned off, and all lines are displayed. While filtering is in effect, an ampersand is displayed at the beginning of the prompt, as a reminder that some lines in the file may be hidden. $ less --version less 487 (GNU regular expressions) Copyright (C) 1984-2016 Mark Nudelman
    - teddyh 2y ago
      Oh, you meant the program “less”! Right, I understand what you meant now.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        :-) Yeah. I was viewing some files and thinking "it'd be really cool if less(1) had some way of filtering to just lines matching a specific pattern". RTFM'd and TIL'd. Mind that at that point I'd used less for ... oh, at least 30 years.
sgarland 2y ago
Agreed. This is also how I found out that features in Python I took for granted, like breakpoint(), were much more recent than I thought (3.7). Nothing like having to use ancient versions of a language to discover limitations.

akvadrako 2y ago

I do a fair bit of bash scripting and there is no way I can remember all the features and syntax I use, so of course I read parts of the manual regularly and often learn new things. You don't need to ever read the whole thing.

sgarland 2y ago

I once worked with a dev (frontend, of all things) who reread the bash manual annually. I work in ops, and I don’t even have that dedication. My hat is off to them.