Re: [tlug] The Mother of All (bash) Commands

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

On 3/18/08, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> On 19/03/2008, Nguyen Vu Hung <vuhung16plus+shape@example.com> wrote:
>
>  > 2008/3/19, Daniel A. Ramaley <daniel.ramaley@example.com>:
>  >
>  > >. Basic commands (like cp) seem to be rather limited
>  >  >  on the non-Linux systems.
>  >
>  > cp and -v options are available in GNU's coreutils.
>
>
> So his point is that when *not* using GNU coreutils, ls(1) has very
>  few useful options.

ls(1) is a bad example.  "Standard" Unix lses are almost as bad as GNU ls.
Off the top of my head, it's the only bad example though.  The GNU variants
of the standard Unix utilities are in general over-engineered and downright
awful.   How could they have possibly managed to break something as easy
as ed(1)?  But leave it to Stallman to figure out a way to do it.
They introduced
an interactive prompt in an unexpected place sometime around 2000 and it
broke all kinds of non-interactive scripts using ed.

-sb