Comment on My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world

• PaX@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool’s built-in usage information.

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  • ck_@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I would disagree, or rather: it depends. You can print the --help of bash, but will that actually tell you anything about bash except a really superficial subset of flags? In the same way that the author argues that the help of his tool is too long to be useful, the help of bash is to short for the same reason. He argues that “cloud tools have a gazillion options where UNIX tools have good defaults”. Bash has a gazillion options and no good defaults. As a matter of fact, bash on defaults is fairly dangerous. Yet, it is at the heart of most Unix systems today I’d argue.

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    • PaX@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.

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    • otl@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Definitely depends, yeah. bash is a huge piece of software that - for me - feels a bit out of place in other systems closer to original unix. Interesting ones are rc and even plain old /bin/sh provided by something like busybox.

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• zlatko@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…

  [zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ man grep | wc -w
  4297
  [zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ man man | wc -w
  4697
  [zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ 
  

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