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> Instead, offer me a graphical solution to the same problem 1. open a folder 2. Click the "File Type" column 3. Drag to select all txt files 4. Hold Ctrl,
by est 14y ago
> Instead, offer me a graphical solution to the same problem
1. open a folder
2. Click the "File Type" column
3. Drag to select all txt files
4. Hold Ctrl, click to deselect the ignore_me.txt
- falcolas 14y agoThat does not fulfill the original requirement set forth by the author: > Here's a simple task: print a list of all the files with a txt extension in the current directory except for ignore_me.txt. Your solution, and one of the the sibling comment solutions, will select all of those files, not print a list of them. Pedantic, perhaps, but the solution outlined by the OP is not mirrored by your solution. This isn't automation, this isn't anything but simple file manipulation, that most graphical operating systems are incapable of; it's also a simple display of how graphical UIs fall short of the shell.
- 69_years_and 14y agoI'm going to guess you are making a joke, esp. the ctrl click to deselect. I did not even read the rest of the article, once I got to the word visual, I did a quick scan for an example, none found, came here to see what others thought. Second read, maybe u are not making a joke? While not mentioned, how would u automate that?
- hollerith 14y agoSince the times when automation is not necessary greatly outnumber the times when it is, "how would u automate that?" is not exactly a knock-out blow to the pro-GUI position. In other words, even for people like me who when asked, "how would u automate that?" would reply, "I'd write a shell script or some Emacs Lisp," it is IMHO often better to do it in a GUI when automation is not necessary. (No joking.)
- gizmo686 14y ago>the times when automation is not necessary greatly outnumber the times when it is That is only because most things that need automization have already been automatic. The advantage of cli is that when you need to automate something, the tools are already there, as apposed to needing to find a completly different set of tools, or manually do the same simple procedure a hundred times.
- hollerith 14y ago>That is only because most things that need automization have already been automatic. That is not an effective response to my point that at any given time, the task I am doing probably does not need to be automated. Yes, CLI has advantages. Some of its advocates however seems to be blind to some of its disadvantages.
- est 14y agoI am not pro-GUI, just providing a possible solution the OP article didn't mention. For the automation part, yes it's going to need scripts, but can your oneliner script handle this file name like this? -\;?.txt I think using the best tools suited for the task. If you need scripts to do the job, use scripts, if just few simple clicks, I don't want to bother find exec xargs pipe here and there.
- bcoates 14y agoIf typing into the search box isn't cheating: 1. Open folder 2. `type:text` in search box 3. Click 'ignore_me.txt' file to exclude, if you can't find it start typing 'ign...' until it shows up 4. Edit > Invert Selection or Alt,E,I
- beatgammit 14y agoThis doesn't seem to be any simpler. The CLI equivalents take about the same time, but selecting all text files surely takes longer than 'ls .txt', especially if there are a lot in the same folder (click first, scroll, shift+click last). If we extend the problem to do something like changing the extension (very common for me) for all selected files, the GUI is useless here. Say I want to turn all .txt files => *.txt.old for a cheap archival? In the GUI, I don't know how to do this. On the CLI, I can simply do a 'find -exec', which also allows me to recursively do the change. Sure, this would be trivial to implement (even Eclipse has a dynamic rename for variable names) with an extension, but this has to be done for each and every possible activity.