12 Dec
2011
12 Dec
'11
11:43 a.m.
On 12 December 2011 17:26, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
Absolutely.
But then email 'em to a Windows user, or quite possibly a Mac user,
and it all falls over... :?)
In many cases, yes. I think we're about to see it again as we
transition from "desktops" controlled by mice to slate-type computers
directly controlled with finger-driven multi-touch and gestural
interfaces on slate computers.
The howls of protest are already beginning, as familiar but
Microsoft-encumbered visual metaphors such as taskbars and start menus
are disappearing from the Linux desktop.
*sigh* ?OK, here's where Dan and I part company. ?I use a GUI all the time.
?Sometimes it's the best/easiest way to do something when I don't want to have to
deal with (remembering) the intricacies of a particular feature/function. ?However, a
poorly implemented/thought out GUI is the devil's spawn and can make a CLI a much
better alternative. ?The alternative is also true, you can have CLIs that are so complex
that tracking all of the options can be a job in and of itself. ?Sometimes a GUI wrapper
can make those cases much easier to deal with.
True!
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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On Dec 12, 2011, at 8:07 AM, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
It's even more general than that. ?Many folks have fallen into the Microsoft (FAT)
limitation that a file is [char]+.[char][char][char] format for a file name. ?Unix has no
such restrictions. ?I often create file names flubber.fubar.gorp.baz or sometimes just
blort. ?About the only thing that the various Unix shells do is that a file name starting
with a '.' are treated special (actually it's 'ls' that does). ?These
are often looked upon as "hidden" files. ?Usually because they contain
configuration information for the shell or some other program. ?Examples: .bashrc, .cshrc,
.emacs, .ssh (for an entire directory), etc.
I agree. ?Why do I want the shell to impose something on the naming of a file?
Perhaps it's just me, but I really quite /liked/ the VMS system:
name.extension;version. Saved my bacon a few times, did file
versioning. Given how cheap disk space is now, I'm saddened it's not
made a comeback.
As to file extensions: well, much as I liked the classic MacOS system,
with strong, meaningful file metadata, even if hidden, the plain old
file-extension system works fairly well. Everything /isn't/ just a
stream of bytes any more and modern Unix doesn't just handle text
files, it handles HTML and XML and images and sounds and
vector-graphics and video and much more besides, in multiple languages
and writing systems.
Yes, true, the old three-letter extensions were very limiting, and
MICROS~1 itself has been trying to move away from them for years, but
it's still quite handy, and most people can readily learn what ".doc"
or ".xls" means, for instance.
They're never going to go away until storage is abstracted away
altogether and actual filesystems disappear, I think.
So, in the meantime, embrace them and work with them, that is my attitude.
They work inasmuch as you can give files a name
with a dot in it and
some text after the dot and it's a valid name.
I'm not sure what your point is here. that's the intended design. When I'm saying it handles it poorly is that,
from the POV of the
shell, it's just a filename, it contains no information. Files called
something-dot-foo can't readily be handled separately from
something-dot-bar.
since when? and why not? Most of us have no problem with this. >> In most modern Unix GUIs, you can sort by file
type, grab all the
>> JPEGs and move them to another folder, say - or even all the image
>> files, all the JPEGs and PNGs and BMPs or whetever. In the shell,
>> that's harder, requiring a serious understanding of the Unix wildcard
>> mechanisms and possibly, as illustrated by some of the replies to my
>> earlier post about log files, writing a short script.
>
> you switch back and forth between how the GUI handles files and how the shell handles
files,which one are you actually having a problem with?
In general, today, with bash on Linux. It's OK, it works, but for
actual file management - moving, renaming, etc. - I tend to use
Nautilus, which behaves much like any file manager on any system.
Shell doesn't.
the GUI can
easily distinguish between x.foo and x.bar named files.then again, so can the shell.
a file extension is not a file "type"extensions as file types is a human
fallacy, not a machine limitation.I regularly use files without any type of extension at
all, quite easily.
also, which shell are we talking about? c-shell? korn shell? bash? zsh?some shells have
"extensions" that can differentiate files based on what's after the dot,some
refer to the system configurations on what those files are.some don't care what a file
is called or what it's "extension" is.
the last type is the most correct, what comes after the dot is not truly an
"extension"it's just part of the file name, and should be treated as such.
the days of the 8 dot 3 file naming and typing conventions are long gone.
Actually it's just by convention and maybe not completely. ?There's absolutely
*no* reason that I can't name files as: jpeg.pict1, jpeg.pict2, etc. ?Or even
jpeg-pic1, pic2-jpeg. ?To find all of the files that I've named with "jpeg",
I could just reference them by "*jpeg*". ?I don't even have to care what
separator character (if any) was used. ?About the only convention that's really
imposed by the OS is '.' & '..'. Yes, to build more complex patterns you need to
understand regular expressions (but even then regular expressions aren't that
difficult)
I beg to differ!
but I'd argue for anything you'd likely be
doing in a GUI, "*" is sufficient.
Go on then, tell me how, with a single command - no FOR loops, no
pipes etc. - I could, say, move all my Bittorrent seed files to a
subfolder in my home directory but all the actual resultant downloads
to a folder on a bigger partition on a different drive.
In Nautilus, I'd do it with sort-by-type, block select, drag, then
sort-by-size, block select, drag somewhere else.
> It might
outrage or dismay the old hands, but progress often does.
I'd argue in many cases that what some folks call progress is really a step
backwards. ?Many powerful concepts were developed early and what some folks call progress
is a "dumbing down" and removal of features because they couldn't be
explained to the masses easily. I suspect most Mac users barely know their machines
have a shell and
never, ever use it. If Ubuntu gets to that point as well, that will be
just fine - so long as people can do what they want and need to do.
The GUI is for
people who don't know how to use a computer.These people should also be forced to use
"driverless-cars"