Re: Simplify the Linux commands

From: Sybren Stuvel (sybrenUSE_at_YOURthirdtower.imagination.com)
Date: 04/01/04 

Date: 01 Apr 2004 07:32:06 GMT

Adam enlightened us with:
> I meant it's natural for the computer. Printing the filenames is just
> a matter of separating them by newlines.

Any data manipulation is natural for a computer.

> Perhaps more importantly, a program receiving as its input the output
> of another command can more naturally process it if one record of
> input is on one line of text.

Which is exactly what already happens! Do "ls | cat" and see what it
looks like.

> Since that format is necessary for piping output, it makes sense to
> have the same format for sending output to the screen, too.

It doesn't have that! If stdout is a terminal, the output is formatted
for a terminal. If stdout is not, it is displayed in one column.

You started this thread with a wish to simplify things - removing
unneeded options, rewriting cryptic ones, etc. so everything would be
easier to use. Now you suggest that people use a different command just
to format the output of 'ls' for the screen. People could put that
command into an alias, of course, but then they'd have to realize that
if they pipe the output through some other program, they'd have to take
the trouble to bypass the alias and use the original "ls" command again.
Why go through so much trouble, if the current "ls" does all of this
automagically for you?

> What I'm saying is that one column is better because it results in
> less total code, not because it looks nicer on the screen.

If less total code is always better, no matter what, then we wouldn't
have easy to use computers, would we? Before C, there were typeless
programming languages, where you had to interpret the bytes yourself. Of
course, directly working with bytes was very natural to the computer. It
wasn't a good thing, though. No everything that is "natural" to a
computer is immediately a good thing.

Sybren 

-- 
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

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