Commands with options: (was: war story: parallel(1) command)

[phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org]

> I hate it that there are so many flags on so many commands.
> <http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/>

Interesting read. Unfortunately, the concept of 'lots of small tools that
do one job well' instead of 'zillions of options' leads to two
alternatives:

1. Concatenate a series of small programs or shell script symbols to do
the job you want, or

2. Hide that construction in an alias.

The disadvantage of 1 is that the incantation is often hard to remember.
My (un)favourite example: the ls command has no option to display only
directories. Yes, there are alternatives, but should you have to commit
something like this to memory: 'ls -p |grep /' ? Surely something like ls
-D would be easier to remember.

How about ls -d */   ?

That's much easier to remember, but my understanding is that only works in
bash.

The disadvantage of 2 is that aliases are non-standard. If you re-install
the system, you have to re-install all your aliases. If they are commands,
they should be included in the operating system. Otherwise, no one else
(human or machine) recognizes your aliases.

Incidentally, it is interesting to see that the man page for cat actually
has examples, something that many man pages could benefit from.
Unfortunately, the cat command has accumulated 10 options, only two of
which have examples.

My solution to this is a correction of hints, which contain these
commands. Many have been contributed by members of TLUG, thank-you. But
that requires looking them up each time.

Incidentally, for me the most useable solution for identifying directories
has been
ls -colour | more.
The directories are a different colour. However, I suspect that's not
totally portable either.


Peter



-- 
Peter Hiscocks
Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
http://www.syscompdesign.com
USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
647-839-0325

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