Shell oddities.

[Stewart Stremler]

begin  quoting Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr. as of Tue, May 11, 2004 at 11:52:30AM -0700:
> On Tue, 11 May 2004, Stewart Stremler wrote:
> 
> > Using a better sh than bash on a linux system would be a good first
> > step, I suppose.
> 
> I agree, and we already have it.  It's called Perl. (or Python, Tcl, etc.)
 
Erm, those aren't sh compatible. :)

> sh should be used by the few system scripts which need to exist.
>
> The other "scripting" languages (bash, csh, ksh, zsh, etc.) should die.
 
I don't think I quite agree.  I might end up in a world where the only
scripting language that's deemed to be worthy is, say, Python, and then
I'd just have to go postal.

> I have finally managed to stop reaching for a quick sh/bash scripts for
> small UNIX tasks.  I now reach for Python, by default.

<shudder>

Sorry, that's just my personal reaction. :)

If it works for you, wonderful!

> This has been the *best* computer productivity enhancement that I have
> made in 10+ years (other than turning the computer off, of course).
 
A clipboard full of scratch paper and a nice pen is a necessary tool for me.

> Yes, sometimes it takes an extra line or two in the script.  However,
> sometimes I wipe out huge numbers of lines because I can reach for the
> proper higher level data structure (list, dict, tree, whatever) rather
> than do extreme gymnastics to crunch everything I need into a single
> stream.

Avoiding extreme gymnastics is good.

Mostly that is a result of being able to characterize the problem
so as to handle it appropriately. (Did you read the rootprompt 
article on image processing with Erlang?  Quite impressive.)

> > -Stewart "No M$OSes in my house; next, no bash shells" Stremler
> 
> Welcome to BSD, then.  ;}

I've tried *BSD almost as many times as I've tried Emacs, and I just 
don't seem to find it as comfortable to use as I expect.   At the
moment, I'm using OSX, which is probably the most comfortable I've
ever been on a BSD(-derived) box.

[But I'm pretty much acting as a plain old user, as to my point of
view, they've devastated the administration portion of the operating
system.]

-Stewart "Any BSD is still better than anything from Redmond" Stremler