7 Apr
2008
7 Apr
'08
11:14 p.m.
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:04:01 -0400
From: Sridhar Ayengar
That's bull. There are ways to make grep output
something like "No
matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it. I suggest that
perhaps those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't use or
understand pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't understand pipes.
If anything, my issue with the evolution of *nix is that the original
philosophy of "write a bunch of simple tools and hook 'em together
via pipes" seems to have been deprecated in the almost 30 years since
I began using Unix. There seems to be a trend of proliferating
options.
Quick, who can recite from memory all of the switches and their
meanings for GNU tar? I can't. Who can understand the tar man
pages? Who knows it to be accurate for the particular incarnation of
tar that they're using?
Cheers,
Chuck