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"Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." – Dennis Ritchie
As someone who has been shell programming for the most of their life; I really enjoyed that article. At the local ruby group I am invited to talk frequently on automation and depending on the group; remind the current generation on the sheer power they have at their fingertips.
It really is an empowering operating system. Yielding power of the user with minimal tokens and dependencies provides it's elegance and beauty in simplicity.
I've been using Unix in some form or another since maybe 1986. It is an enormously effective lever. But the grody cruft isn't getting better -- there's an upper boundary on how happy I can be using it, but it's an aesthetic and not a technical one.
Partly this is nostalgia, and partly it's diminishing marginal returns. Nothing that happens to me is going to be as jarring a leap into the future as sitting down in front of a PC RT was, and I guess that's sad.
I read your "http://homonculus.net/blog/2012/11/11/what-shell-should-i-us... post. I wanted to comment though you may or may not be interested. I use ash (Almquist Sh) for my 'non-interactive' script executions. For interactive flow I use zsh. For root on my BSD boxes I use tcsh and bash on my Funtoo boxes simply because I don't care to alter or customize the root account. I would be interested in what your inferring to with reference to `grody cruft`.
For less grody cruft, and as a challenge to up your game, try layering plan9port or the Inferno VM over your *nix.
See Neal Stephenson's IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMAND LINE. It's all symbol manipulation.
Full text: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
TL;DR:
"Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously."
That whole essay is eminently quotable. You've picked up one of my two favorite sections (with "Ronald Reagan is your Web browser" being a close third).
Describing operating systems, using the inevitable automobile analogy. Windows (mopeds, crappy station wagons, and lumbering SUVs), Apple (stylish Euro-sedans), BeOS (batmobiles), and ...
"Linux ... is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free."
Huh. I'm a Linux-using, liberal-arts CS major and I had no idea that this was even a thing.
I suspect that a large part of this trend is pragmatism vs idealism. From what I hear of days gone by, using *nix wasn't ever really a pragmatic decision. It may suck to be boxed into a GUI, but an engineer might be more inclined to make the compromise and get the job done than a liberal arts major.
His references where mainly to *BSD and Bell Labs UNIX. In 1998 the open source ecosystem was something everyone was looking at from artisans to engineers. Also the landscape was different as we where all inside an economic bubble at the time whereas the article explores the discontent of administering Microsoft products over working with the shell and posix system utilities.
The couldn't even spell 'creat' right!
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."
> The
Really, now.
I saw that right after I posted... kept it for irony sake.
cat file | grep searchterm ? Really? <shivers>
It is indeed rather ironic that an article touting the beauty and simplicity of Unix would win the "Useless Use of Cat Award". For those unfamiliar with it:
http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html
The purpose of cat is to concatenate (or "catenate") files. If it's only one file, concatenating it with nothing at all is a waste of time, and costs you a process.
If this a reference to "cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10" there is more wrong with that than simply the senseless execution of the poor kitten in the processing of that statement.
It did follow with "though not syntactically correct". I believe the article was slated not for the current UNIX practitioners at the time but for communicating with NT administrators hence not following the concept where less external calls produces faster script execution; the referenced issue would have been `grep shrimp < menu` whereas the the redirection is optional as it's default.
None the less to be informative as the others which have responded I would like to expand on the concept as it's a logical pattern which is still passed down in explaining computational models and simply creating better development and scalable software where an interpreter is used.
Much like the current culture considers DRY( Don't Repeat Yourself) as a refactoring step to get their code to be the most bug free; fastest while being in form of a readable one-liner is much the same we do as stating "filter early and filter often".
Lighter weight tokens provide faster execution( i.e. use the utility command cut in place of the general purpose pipeline language awk; refactor to avoid unneeded call to xargs, and of course use cat only when it is useful such as testing heredocs prior to embedding the generator to log, mail, filesystem or network).
From my observations many people first begin to learn to use pipes with grep. First explanation is almost always to explore interactively the `cat file | grep pattern`. It's a poor pedagogy simply because it causes bad habits from the beginning.
We live in a autodidact world presently which is a good thing but the information on occasion seems to be diluted with a self starter which misinforms and creates a cancer growing within other sort of "what I learned on my OSX about this ancient UNIX thing" style posts.
We can't all have been lucky to read or learn from the philosophies of Kernighan, McIlroy et al. Though `cat` is a famous pet peeve (no pun intended) my personal favorite is when I read a post which explores regular expressions and claims that they came from grep or better I have actually seem someone claim that they came from perl. These are worse crimes than creating an award for executing kittens any day of the week.
reads better than `<file grep searchterm` and is minimally wasteful.
I think the point was that you could write it with no io redirections, since grep lets you pass a filename as an argument:
grep pattern file
"Don't pipe a cat." is an evocative way to think of this...