11 Dec
2011
11 Dec
'11
8:17 p.m.
On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 04:59:48PM +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
On 8 December 2011 21:03, Dave McGuire <mcguire at
neurotica.com> wrote:
Wrong tool.
If you want to do the above, use mmv:
mmv "*.log" "#1.old"
On 12/07/2011 08:14 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
What is so tough is the way that the shell expands them, not the
command. I am assured this is wonderfully useful for many people but
for me it's a complete PITA. For instance, I frequently need to do
things like:
REN *.log *.old
... which works fine on DOS, Windows and most other OSs but doesn't
work on Unix/Linux.
I don't really understand why any techie dislikes it, TBH. It is
/vastly/ easier than, say, learning to understand how Unix wildcards
work, let alone regular expressions or something - both things which
I've not yet mastered after more than 20y of effort.
?UNIX shell wildcards? ?A question mark matches any single character, an
asterisk matches any number of any characters. ?What's so tough about that? In general, because file extensions are a sort of
grafted-on
afterthought on Unix, I find it handles them very poorly, whereas they
Unix actually doesn't give a damn about so-called file extensions. As
far as Unix cares, ".log", ".png", ".whatever" is just a
part of the
filename. And it is perfectly happy to go and run a shell script called
"foo.cannot_be_executed" as long as the appropriate r & x bits in the
permissions are set. This is because for Unix filesystems, the name
of a file is simple a 0-terminated string of bytes with pretty much only
two rules as to its content: it cannot contain "/" (path separator)
and it cannot contain 0 (end-of-string in C). Also, there tends to be
a limit as to maximum path length. Beyond that, Unix doesn't even
pretend to care what you name your files.
(ok, "." and ".." are "magic" directory entries that cannot
be used
for file names)
It is as simple as that ;-)
were and remain integral to DOS-based &
Windows-based systems - i.e.
about 95% of the machines I support.
Well, I first discovered Unix in 1993 and it has been revelation for me.
To each his own ;-)
?Regexps aren't quite that simple, but I have
a hard time believing anyone
couldn't get the general idea after maybe ten minutes. ?If you want to learn
that stuff, contact me offlist and I'll be happy to help.
I've been bending my brain against it since 1988. I doubt it's going
to stick now! Windows knowledge has to be updated every few years as
MICROS~1 change
everything, and I don't really like Windows any more anyway, even if I
know it better than anything else.
For the last 10+ years I pretty much only touched Windows, reluctantly,
when I got paid for it. The platform is just to damn annoying and useless
for my needs.
Unix knowledge helps me out on Linux but I am a bit of
a Unix-hater
Whereas I'm more of a Unix zealot, but a reasonable one ;-)
really, at heart, and I have never managed to truly
master shell or C
or Perl or regexps or any of the core Unix toolkit.
They are very powerful tools, but admittedly, not for everyone.
Linux has fixed
and improved lots of things, but it's still the same ugly, hostile old
system underneath.
Well, there is the old saw: "Unix _is_ userfriendly. It is just very
selective who its friends are." ;-)
OSs I really /liked/ at some time or for some reason
included Acorn
RISC OS, BeOS, classic MacOS, OS/2, Psion EPOC, NewtonOS and Novell
Netware 2 and 3. And VMS, I suppose, but I only ever scratched the
surface. And all of them had lovely aspects that I cherished but also
terrible *terrible* problems and weaknesses as well.
All are essentially dead and gone now.
Don't tell that to the OMP, 2 MP2100 and the emate in the shelf behind me.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison