Re: [9fans] du and find

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:26:07PM +0200, Mathieu Lonjaret wrote:
> No idea, probably none.
>
> that would not be the interesting point, if any.  it's just that the
> tool is already there and (should be) simpler to use than piping
> various commands around, as they illustrate below.

> Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 05:18:56 -0700
> From: Akshat Kumar <akumar@mail.nanosouffle.net>
> Subject: Re: [9fans] du and find
> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
>
> >From the website:
>
> "ack is written purely in Perl, and takes advantage
> of the power of Perl's regular expressions."
>
> Forgive my ignorance and irrelevance to this topic,
> but what are the advantages of Perl's regular
> expressions, over the implementation we have
> currently in Plan 9?

I had in fact the answer, a long time ago: because they simply do not
know that ed(1) exists, and sed(1) etc.

A group, providing an ISDN router based on Debian, was requiring a lot
of memory and disk space. I asked why??? that much for _that_?!! The
answer: we need perl(1) installed. But what for? Answer: to replace
@@GATEWAY@@ and so on by customized values in a file... (They didn't
even thought of building a distribution on a vulcan to simply install on
the target.)

They didn't know about ed(1). So I tell them regexp were ed(1); and
ed(1) was required by POSIX.2. And tried to make the demonstration... to
see that Debian didn't provide ed(1) by default. I ask Debian, why the
f...?!!? Answer: GNU's Not Unix...

And this day I realized I was not GNU. And switch to *BSD before asking
myself some questions that lead me to Plan9...
--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
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