[TUHS] dmr note on BSD's sins

[a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com (A. P. Garcia)]

On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 4, 2017, at 19:14, Larry McVoy wrote:
>> On Thu, May 04, 2017 at 03:59:22PM +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>> > On 3 May 2017, at 14:41, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > Along these lines, who said "Cat went to Berkely, came back waving flags."
>> >
>> > And anyone who lived through the SunOS 4 -- SunOS 5 transition will know that some of those Berkeley flags (not specifically for cat, but almost certainly including those for cat) were really quite useful.  I remember spending really a long time finding and building BSD/GNU versions of utilities which actually had the options you needed on early SunOS 5 machines: later on Sun themselves put some of them back.
>
> I mean, there's a legitimate argument that some of them would have been
> just as useful or more as separate utilities than as flags. But to some
> extent the fully generalized version seems questionable.
>
> I mean, to apply the design philosophy to, say, ls -t (nevermind that
> this particular flag has in fact existed since Unix V1, it's exactly the
> *kind* of thing that should prompt someone who is consistently applying
> Pike's idea of the unix philosophy to say "sorting should be the sort
> tool"), you would have to have A) a basic "ls" command which does all
> the filesystem-accessing work and prints timestamps and all other
> relevant output in a format that can be sorted lexicographically, B) run
> it through sort(1), C) a command [or maybe an awk script] that will pare
> it back down to the usual human-readable formats (names only, ls -l, or
> maybe a timestamp-and-name format, with human-friendly timestamps). And
> then D) another tool to sort it into columns.

have you been using powershell lately? it makes things like this
rather enjoyable. yes, powershell is open source, and yes, it's been
ported to linux, but i think unix needs its own home-grown "object
oriented shell".


<snip>