[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Douglas McIlroy]

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Eloquently put. Amen!

doug

> Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,
> anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park. Today, everything
> is GUI and nothing can be automated easily or, most of the time,
> not at all.

> Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and
complexity.

> It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[A. P. Garcia]

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On Sun, Jun 9, 2024, 7:35 AM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
wrote:

> Eloquently put. Amen!
>
> doug
>
> > Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,
> > anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park. Today, everything
> > is GUI and nothing can be automated easily or, most of the time,
> > not at all.
>
> > Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and
> complexity.
>
> > It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most
>


Do I have to be that guy? I hate windows. I love Unix. But the above isn't
really true. MS has actually done a good job of catching up in that
department. All major apps have Powershell libraries. I envy some features
of Powershell, but I still won't use it unless I have to.

One example is PowerCLI, which is very useful for vSphere automation.
Easier to use than their other language APIs, in my opinion. I could go on
with other examples (Active Directory, MSSQL, Exchange), but I think the
point is made...

>

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi A. P.,

> All major apps have Powershell libraries.  I envy some features of
> Powershell, but I still won't use it unless I have to.
>
> One example is PowerCLI, which is very useful for vSphere automation.
> Easier to use than their other language APIs, in my opinion.

The grandfather of your post address Powershell earlier on.

https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/QZVFRCYM2MEJ4VNZPORBUAKIS6WG6LIY/
> The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program
> that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking
> of passing binary objects rather than text between program
> - a decidedly non-portable idea.
>
> Passing "objects" requires attaching to a dynamically linked library
> (that will change or even disappear with the next release of the OS or
> the object library).  With Research Unix, I could pipe the output of
> a Unix program running on an Intel 486 to another program running on
> a Motorola 68000 or a Zilog Z80000 or an IBM AIX machine.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[A. P. Garcia]

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On Sun, Jun 9, 2024, 8:40 AM Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi A. P.,
>
> > All major apps have Powershell libraries.  I envy some features of
> > Powershell, but I still won't use it unless I have to.
> >
> > One example is PowerCLI, which is very useful for vSphere automation.
> > Easier to use than their other language APIs, in my opinion.
>
> The grandfather of your post address Powershell earlier on.
>
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/QZVFRCYM2MEJ4VNZPORBUAKIS6WG6LIY/
> > The concept of producing a stream of text as the output of a program
> > that does simple jobs well has been replaced by "power-shell" thinking
> > of passing binary objects rather than text between program
> > - a decidedly non-portable idea.
> >
> > Passing "objects" requires attaching to a dynamically linked library
> > (that will change or even disappear with the next release of the OS or
> > the object library).  With Research Unix, I could pipe the output of
> > a Unix program running on an Intel 486 to another program running on
> > a Motorola 68000 or a Zilog Z80000 or an IBM AIX machine.
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
>

Thank you, I hadn't seen that. He's right, of course. It's kludgy, but you
can always use text, or some structured form of it like json or xml, to
communicate between different machines. Does windows have something like
netcat/socat? I honestly don't know.

>

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Ed Bradford]

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Hi A.P.,

I agree powershell supports automation. However, it so complex and
non-portable
that even learning about it and how to use it takes considerably longer than
learning about Unix automation. It puts a significant burden on developers
to
document their DLL's and make the interfaces permanent. Complexity produces
more
expensive and less reliable software.

BTW, what about the non-major apps? From your view, they are simply excluded
from automation.


In PS, type "help cmdlet" to see
the complexity of each and every command. PS does allow automation, but
it is very expensive because most people will be daunted when trying to
learn how
to solve problems with it, people who know how to write stuff in PS are
more expensive
employees, and development time for asking a simple question like

  "Show me the last 5 files read in a directory tree"

can require days or more of research and experimentation.

A help page on almost any cmdlet produces a full page-width
pages of options, many of which lead to further questions about
usage.

Yes, PS automates Windows -- but at what cost?

Ed

PS: I should write my book of "Why Windows is not my favorite
operating system" (paraphrasing a famous BTL TM).

PS2: Speaking of complexity and documentation, here is the start
     of the printout on an up-to-date MacOS of the command

     man ls | less






*NAME       ls – list directory contents     SYNOPSIS       ls
[-@ABCFGHILOPRSTUWabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxy1%,] [--color=when]          [-D
format] [file ...]*

     and the same question about "ls" on Windows 11 powershell:

       help ls | less    # typed in PS

[image: image.png]


How did we let this happen?

On Sun, Jun 9, 2024 at 6:59 AM A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Jun 9, 2024, 7:35 AM Douglas McIlroy <
> douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
>> Eloquently put. Amen!
>>
>> doug
>>
>> > Unix brought automation to the forefront of possibilities. Using Unix,
>> > anyone could do it - even that kid in Jurassic Park. Today, everything
>> > is GUI and nothing can be automated easily or, most of the time,
>> > not at all.
>>
>> > Unix is an ever shrinking oasis in a desert of non-automation and
>> complexity.
>>
>> > It is the loss of automation possibilities that frustrates me the most
>>
>
>
> Do I have to be that guy? I hate windows. I love Unix. But the above isn't
> really true. MS has actually done a good job of catching up in that
> department. All major apps have Powershell libraries. I envy some features
> of Powershell, but I still won't use it unless I have to.
>
> One example is PowerCLI, which is very useful for vSphere automation.
> Easier to use than their other language APIs, in my opinion. I could go on
> with other examples (Active Directory, MSSQL, Exchange), but I think the
> point is made...
>
>>

-- 
Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.
  Cicero

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-06-10T00:13:08-0500, Ed Bradford wrote:
> PS2: Speaking of complexity and documentation, here is the start
>      of the printout on an up-to-date MacOS of the command
> 
>      man ls | less
[...]
> How did we let this happen?

When "everything is a file", a lot gets packed into one's file
abstraction.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Mon, 10 Jun 2024, Ed Bradford wrote:

> [...] people who know how to write stuff in PS are more expensive 
> employees, and development time for asking a simple question like
> 
>   "Show me the last 5 files read in a directory tree"

Likely a one-liner in Unix :-)

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Marc Donner]

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The architectural alternative to powershell-style extension has been around
in various guises for a while.  In particular things like TCL and Lua are
engineered to be add-on extension languages.  Integrating them just
involves adding a few callouts (dispatch a “program”, scan directories in a
designated “path” for programs, render internal structures into text).

This style of design has been around for a long time - all Unix shells,
EMacs, many video games.

It enables an elegant approach to performance management - build it first
as a script and only reimplement it as a binary if needed.

Doing this enables automation, but it does require the designers and
product managers to want automation.

Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 4:39 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 10 Jun 2024, Ed Bradford wrote:
>
> > [...] people who know how to write stuff in PS are more expensive
> > employees, and development time for asking a simple question like
> >
> >   "Show me the last 5 files read in a directory tree"
>
> Likely a one-liner in Unix :-)
>
> -- Dave

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Marc Donner wrote in
 <CALQ0xCCNYP26Crv6m6Xp7efBL-wzfTB=fgZa9cKkVFvNacv-tw@mail.gmail.com>:
 |The architectural alternative to powershell-style extension has been around
 |in various guises for a while.  In particular things like TCL and Lua are
 |engineered to be add-on extension languages.  Integrating them just
 |involves adding a few callouts (dispatch a “program”, scan directories in a
 |designated “path” for programs, render internal structures into text).
 |
 |This style of design has been around for a long time - all Unix shells,
 |EMacs, many video games.
 |
 |It enables an elegant approach to performance management - build it first
 |as a script and only reimplement it as a binary if needed.
 |
 |Doing this enables automation, but it does require the designers and
 |product managers to want automation.

Let me be the one who feed the silent head shakers with the
Rob Pike quote "[just] make it strings".

Of course lua hooks are faster, and i am looking forward myself,
but other than that textual input/output communication with
a program is language-neutral and somehow humanic.

So now the time has come to point to an influential -- for me --
manual from 2001, that goes into assembler programming for x86:

  https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/x86/

And there you read things like

  A.12. One-Pointed Mind

  As a student of Zen, I like the idea of a one-pointed mind: Do
  one thing at a time, and do it well.

  This, indeed, is very much how UNIX® works as well. While
  a typical Windows® application is attempting to do everything
  imaginable (and is, therefore, riddled with bugs), a typical
  UNIX® program does only one thing, and it does it well.

  The typical UNIX® user then essentially assembles his own
  applications by writing a shell script which combines the
  various existing programs by piping the output of one program to
  the input of another.

  When writing your own UNIX® software, it is generally a good
  idea to see what parts of the problem you need to solve can be
  handled by existing programs, and only write your own programs
  for that part of the problem that you do not have an existing
  solution for.

And going over

  A.13.2. Excursion to Pinhole Photography

we come to the

  A.13.3.1. Processing Program Input

which was a stunning read for me (the 15+ years before i came via
Commodore 64 and its Basic, over Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and,
alongside, DOS, later 4DOS (then perl etc.)), because when doing
really, really important things like calculating the cubic
capacity of ones penis' in cubic millimeters (to end up with large
numbers, say), i would never have thought by myself that the
program accept and parse running text!  (There you see that
something "big" can actually be pretty "small" indeed.)

  Personally, I like to keep it simple. Something either is
  a number, so I process it. Or it is not a number, so I discard
  it. I do not like the computer complaining about me typing in an
  extra character when it is obvious that it is an extra
  character. Duh.

  Plus, it allows me to break up the monotony of computing and
  type in a query instead of just a number:

    What is the best pinhole diameter for the focal length of 150?

  There is no reason for the computer to spit out a number of complaints:

    Syntax error: What
    Syntax error: is
    Syntax error: the
    Syntax error: best

  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And this (assembler!) then goes to

    % pinhole

    Computer,

    What size pinhole do I need for the focal length of 150?
    150	490	306	362	2930	12
    Hmmm... How about 160?
    160	506	316	362	3125	12
    Let's make it 155, please.
    155	498	311	362	3027	12
    Ah, let's try 157...
    157	501	313	362	3066	12
    156?
    156	500	312	362	3047	12
    That's it! Perfect! Thank you very much!
    ^D

which is not even handled by GNU getopt with its
argument-resorting behaviour!
But it is likely that you all do not need that no more anyway,
since you likely just speak out (silently at "Hal" level) "Hey
computer bla bla", and the AI does the rest itself.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Marc Donner]

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Totally correct - in the words of the immortal Beatles - "Strings is all
you need."
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 3:40 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> Marc Donner wrote in
>  <CALQ0xCCNYP26Crv6m6Xp7efBL-wzfTB=fgZa9cKkVFvNacv-tw@mail.gmail.com>:
>  |The architectural alternative to powershell-style extension has been
> around
>  |in various guises for a while.  In particular things like TCL and Lua are
>  |engineered to be add-on extension languages.  Integrating them just
>  |involves adding a few callouts (dispatch a “program”, scan directories
> in a
>  |designated “path” for programs, render internal structures into text).
>  |
>  |This style of design has been around for a long time - all Unix shells,
>  |EMacs, many video games.
>  |
>  |It enables an elegant approach to performance management - build it first
>  |as a script and only reimplement it as a binary if needed.
>  |
>  |Doing this enables automation, but it does require the designers and
>  |product managers to want automation.
>
> Let me be the one who feed the silent head shakers with the
> Rob Pike quote "[just] make it strings".
>
> Of course lua hooks are faster, and i am looking forward myself,
> but other than that textual input/output communication with
> a program is language-neutral and somehow humanic.
>
> So now the time has come to point to an influential -- for me --
> manual from 2001, that goes into assembler programming for x86:
>
>   https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/developers-handbook/x86/
>
> And there you read things like
>
>   A.12. One-Pointed Mind
>
>   As a student of Zen, I like the idea of a one-pointed mind: Do
>   one thing at a time, and do it well.
>
>   This, indeed, is very much how UNIX® works as well. While
>   a typical Windows® application is attempting to do everything
>   imaginable (and is, therefore, riddled with bugs), a typical
>   UNIX® program does only one thing, and it does it well.
>
>   The typical UNIX® user then essentially assembles his own
>   applications by writing a shell script which combines the
>   various existing programs by piping the output of one program to
>   the input of another.
>
>   When writing your own UNIX® software, it is generally a good
>   idea to see what parts of the problem you need to solve can be
>   handled by existing programs, and only write your own programs
>   for that part of the problem that you do not have an existing
>   solution for.
>
> And going over
>
>   A.13.2. Excursion to Pinhole Photography
>
> we come to the
>
>   A.13.3.1. Processing Program Input
>
> which was a stunning read for me (the 15+ years before i came via
> Commodore 64 and its Basic, over Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and,
> alongside, DOS, later 4DOS (then perl etc.)), because when doing
> really, really important things like calculating the cubic
> capacity of ones penis' in cubic millimeters (to end up with large
> numbers, say), i would never have thought by myself that the
> program accept and parse running text!  (There you see that
> something "big" can actually be pretty "small" indeed.)
>
>   Personally, I like to keep it simple. Something either is
>   a number, so I process it. Or it is not a number, so I discard
>   it. I do not like the computer complaining about me typing in an
>   extra character when it is obvious that it is an extra
>   character. Duh.
>
>   Plus, it allows me to break up the monotony of computing and
>   type in a query instead of just a number:
>
>     What is the best pinhole diameter for the focal length of 150?
>
>   There is no reason for the computer to spit out a number of complaints:
>
>     Syntax error: What
>     Syntax error: is
>     Syntax error: the
>     Syntax error: best
>
>   Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
>
> And this (assembler!) then goes to
>
>     % pinhole
>
>     Computer,
>
>     What size pinhole do I need for the focal length of 150?
>     150 490     306     362     2930    12
>     Hmmm... How about 160?
>     160 506     316     362     3125    12
>     Let's make it 155, please.
>     155 498     311     362     3027    12
>     Ah, let's try 157...
>     157 501     313     362     3066    12
>     156?
>     156 500     312     362     3047    12
>     That's it! Perfect! Thank you very much!
>     ^D
>
> which is not even handled by GNU getopt with its
> argument-resorting behaviour!
> But it is likely that you all do not need that no more anyway,
> since you likely just speak out (silently at "Hal" level) "Hey
> computer bla bla", and the AI does the rest itself.
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
>

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[TUHS] Re: most direct Unix descendant

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Marc Donner wrote in
 <CALQ0xCD0YPurnXnWnK6Q-E0ndXwztzoYHKK9Pr+Sef8=XGtb2Q@mail.gmail.com>:
 |Totally correct - in the words of the immortal Beatles - "Strings is all
 |you need."

Sounds a bit like a somewhat pissed younger John Lennon?
Iggy's "put some strings, you know" on some of those photograph
seamy American carpets.
(Of course -- i have no idea of what i am talking about.)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: Likely a one-liner in Unix

[James Frew]

OK, I'll bite (NB: using GNU find):

find "$directory_tree" -type f -printf "%A+ %p\n" | sort -r | cut -d' ' 
-f2 | head -5

Cheers,
/Frew

On 2024-06-10 01:39, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jun 2024, Ed Bradford wrote:
>
>> [...] people who know how to write stuff in PS are more expensive
>> employees, and development time for asking a simple question like
>>
>>    "Show me the last 5 files read in a directory tree"
> Likely a one-liner in Unix :-)
>
> -- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Likely a one-liner in Unix

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi James,

> > >    "Show me the last 5 files read in a directory tree"

Given sort(1) gained -u for efficiency, I've often wondered why, in
those constrained times, it didn't have a ‘-m n’ to output only the
n ‘minimums’, e.g. ‘sed ${n}q’.  With ‘-m 5’, this would let sort track
the current fifth entry and discard input which was bigger, so avoiding
both storing many unwanted lines and finding the current line's location
within them.


> OK, I'll bite (NB: using GNU find):

I think the POSIX way of getting the atime would be ‘LC_CTIME=C ls -lu’
and then parsing the two possible date formats.  So non-POSIX find is
simpler.  Also, GNU find shows me the sub-second part but ls doesn't.
Neither does GNU ‘stat -c '%X %n'’.

> find "$directory_tree" -type f -printf "%A+ %p\n" | sort -r | cut -d' ' -f2 | head -5

- I'd switch the atime format to seconds since epoch for easier
  formatting given it's discarded.
- When atimes tie, sort's -r will give file Z before A so I'd add some
  -k's so A comes first.
- I'd move the head to before the cut so cut processes fewer lines...
- But on so few lines, I'd just use sed to do both in one.

    find "$@" -type f -printf '%A@ %p\n' |
    sort -k1,1nr -k2 |
    sed 's/^[^ ]* //; 5q'


Remaining issues...

If tied entries bridge the top-five border then this isn't shown.
Is the real requirement to show files with the five most recent distinct
atimes?

    awk '{t += !s[$0]; s[$0] = 1; print} t == 5 {exit}'

Though this might give many lines.  Instead, an ellipsis could show
a tie bridged the cut-off.

    awk 't {if ($0 == l) print "..."; exit} NR == 5 {l = $0; t = 1} 1'

Paths can contain linefeeds and some versions allow handling NULs to be
tediously employed.

    find "$@" -type f -printf '%A@ %p\0' |
    sort -z -k1,1nr -k2 |
    sed -z 's/[^ ]* //; 5q' |
    tr \\0 \\n


David Wheeler has a nice article he maintains on unusual characters in
filenames: how to cope, and what other systems do, e.g. Plan 9.

    Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames: control characters (such as
        newline), leading dashes, and other problems
    David A. Wheeler, 2023-08-22 (originally 2009-03-24)
    https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html

As he writes, Linux already returns EINVAL for some paths on some
filesystem types.  A mount option which had a syscall return an error on
meeting an insensible path would be useful.  It avoids any attempt at
escapement and its greater risk of implementation errors.  I could
always re-mount some old volume without the option to list the directory
and fix up its entries.  The second-best day to plant a tree is today.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Likely a one-liner in Unix

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Ralph Corderoy wrote in
 <20240611080506.73D7B21309@orac.inputplus.co.uk>:
 ..
 |>>>    "Show me the last 5 files read in a directory tree"
 ...
 |Neither does GNU ‘stat -c '%X %n'’.

Unfortunately "stat" is not portable.

  ...
 |David Wheeler has a nice article he maintains on unusual characters in
 |filenames: how to cope, and what other systems do, e.g. Plan 9.
 |
 |    Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames: control characters (such as
 |        newline), leading dashes, and other problems
 |    David A. Wheeler, 2023-08-22 (originally 2009-03-24)
 |    https://dwheeler.com/essays/fixing-unix-linux-filenames.html
 |
 |As he writes, Linux already returns EINVAL for some paths on some
 |filesystem types.  A mount option which had a syscall return an error on
 |meeting an insensible path would be useful.  It avoids any attempt at
 |escapement and its greater risk of implementation errors.  I could
 |always re-mount some old volume without the option to list the directory
 |and fix up its entries.  The second-best day to plant a tree is today.

dash is currently implementing $'' quotes (that will be part of
the next POSIX i think).  I want to mention again, eh, please let
me just paste something of mine from ossec from may, as i really
think in $'' could lie sanity also for such things:

  While here please let me back the not yet gracefully supported
  shell escape mechanism $''.
  The current approach seems to be to be as atomic as possible:

    # touch $(printf 'a\rb\tc\a')
    # ll
  ->
    -rw-r----- 1 steffen steffen   0 May  3 00:46 'c'$'\a'
    -rw-r----- 1 steffen steffen   0 May  3 00:46 'a'$'\r''b'

  (GNU coreutils).  Isn't that just terrible?  In (the development
  version of) my mailer tab-completion leads to

    #..mbox? /tmp/<TAB>
    $'a\rb'
    $'c\a'

  which i find at least a little bit better.  (Do not even think
  about looking in its implementation though, look ICU or what.)

  And even though currently unsupported, it should be said that with
  "grapheme clusters" and in general things like ligatures and other
  such language-specific constructs which need to look at
  surroundings -- in general interfaces like towupper() etc are not
  useful in global context, entire sentences have to be looked at as
  a whole due to this! --, shell quotes should be extended to the
  largest possible range possible.  Ie, all the iconv(3)s that are
  currently used because of a lack of other interfaces should be
  enabled to see the longest possible (sub)string, not the most
  atomar, as seen above.

Anyhow, with proper $'' quoting that also offers \$VAR/\${VAR} for
example (which acts like "$VAR" in double quotes; and \c@==NUL,
xx) there would be a way to a have a holistic quoting mechanism.

Some more complaining of an idiot who does not understand why ISO
C and more standardized holes in the \U and \u (Unicode code
point, hexadecimal) ranges.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)