From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: perry at piermont.com (Perry E. Metzger)
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 07:24:05 -0400
Subject: [COFF] Other OSes?
In-Reply-To: <20180709015650.GA29373@thunk.org>
References: <82df833ae2a587b386b4154fc6051356a3510b19@webmail.yaccman.com>
 <129a13eb-de93-3d6b-b7b5-d0df13e60c87@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net>
 <20180709015650.GA29373@thunk.org>
Message-ID: <20180709072405.1caef2b0@jabberwock.cb.piermont.com>

On Sun, 8 Jul 2018 21:56:50 -0400 "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso at mit.edu>
wrote:
> These days, I'll just use emacs's query-replace, which will allow
> me to approve each change in context, either for each change, or
> once I'm confident that I got the simple-search-and-replace, or
> regexp-search-and-replace right, have it do the rest of the changes
> w/o approval.

I often use a utility called "qsubst" that allows emacs-like query
replace at the command line. I got it off the net around 1990 and
haven't seen it widely distributed, but it's Damn Useful.

On the more general topic: I, too, never used Unix on a printing
terminal (by the time I got to it in the early 1980s everything was
CRTs) and I've used shell scripts pretty consistently over the few
decades. I tend not to write really long ones any more -- the advent
of Perl and then languages like Ruby and Python sort of ended that --
but I write short ones a lot, and I write five-line ones at the bash
prompt several times a day. (One reason why emacs/vi like command
line editing is so useful to me is it lets me quickly hack up a
script at the terminal prompt.)

And yes, if it's got a couple of nested loops and a long pipeline or
two, I think it's still a script even if I type it ad hoc.

> It's not what you *can't* do with a glass-tty.  It's just that with
> a glass-tty, I'm much more likely to rely on incremental searches
> of my bash command-line history to execute previous commands,
> possibly with some changes, because it's more convenient than
> firing up an editor and creating a shell script.

Indeed. That's my work style as well.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com