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On Mon, 1 May 2023, rds_met wrote:
Hi there I stumbled on this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy "Unix philosophy" while making some links explaining "awk" to the uninitiated. It's good isn't it?!
It was good... It started to get less good round about the mid 80s... Take the "Do one thing well" part...The 'ls' command used to just output the filenames, one per line and do nothing else.
(It still does that if it recognises that output is not a terminal - try: ls | cat)
So you wanted the filenames sorted? ls | sort Want them in columns? ls | sort | pr -4 Paged: ls | sort | pr -4 | more and so on.Today, ls has been expanded, bloated, some may say, so it has all the options in one command. Less is more, as they said.
Similarly some may remember searching the file system for files containing e.g. stdio.h with:
find . -type t -name \*.c -exec fgrep stdio.h {} /dev/null \;
or as we might work out what we do today is 'bloat' the grep command to do
the recursive find and print the filename.. (fgrep -r -l stdio.h) and who
cares about the filename filtering...
And theres me using fgrep rather than grep as fgrep used to be faster. Oh well.
But then we've paid for the faster cpu, faster IO and more memory, so might as well use it...
My first Unix experience was in 1980 on a PDP-11/40 with 128KB of core memory. It was nice and due to the contraints we had to work like the above with piped small commands - I don't consider that time the "glory days" but I appreciate what we did with the contraints, but do I want to go back to it? Well for day to day use, no, not really.
For hobby/fun use? Well... Yes which is why I've developed just such a system running on a 16-bit CPU... Although it's not Unix, nor C, but maybe a step back, so Multi-tasking, but single user and BCPL rather than C. What we do for a bit of retro fun...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/