Re: [tlug] The Mother of All (bash) Commands

[Dave Brown <dagbrown@example.com>]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 10:59:23PM -0800, SL Baur wrote:
> On 3/18/08, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> > On 19/03/2008, Nguyen Vu Hung <vuhung16plus+shape@example.com> wrote:
> >
> >  > 2008/3/19, Daniel A. Ramaley <daniel.ramaley@example.com>:
> >  >
> >  > >. Basic commands (like cp) seem to be rather limited
> >  >  >  on the non-Linux systems.
> >  >
> >  > cp and -v options are available in GNU's coreutils.
> >
> >
> > So his point is that when *not* using GNU coreutils, ls(1) has very
> >  few useful options.
> 
> ls(1) is a bad example.  "Standard" Unix lses are almost as bad as GNU ls.

Bah, how can you say that?

Solaris ls's response to "ls --honk":

    ls: illegal option -- honk
    usage: ls -1RaAdCxmnlhogrtucpFbqisfHLeE@ [files]

GNU ls's response to "ls --honk":

    ls: unrecognized option `--honk'
    Try `ls --help' for more information.

Okay, fine:

    :) [~] ls --help | wc -l
    108

Why, Solaris ls only has 29 different options to choose from!  

That is a bit of an oversimplification though--GNU ls has a mere 57
options (on my system), not the 108 that my wc -l would seem to imply.
It's a shame that ls --color --help doesn't syntax-highlight the help
message to make it easier to read.

> Off the top of my head, it's the only bad example though.  The GNU variants
> of the standard Unix utilities are in general over-engineered and downright
> awful.   How could they have possibly managed to break something as easy
> as ed(1)?  But leave it to Stallman to figure out a way to do it.
> They introduced an interactive prompt in an unexpected place sometime
> around 2000 and it broke all kinds of non-interactive scripts using
> ed.

Ah, but GNU ed does have that lovely brain-poisoning "wq" command.

--Dave