this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
51 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17915 readers
68 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can do most things by combining simple cmdline tools. E.g. filter out some specific lines from all files in a directory, get the value after the second
:, write those to another file and then sort, deduplicate and count them.This may sound complicated, but it's pretty easy and fast if your are familiar with a shell. To be that efficient with your shell you want it to actually be powerful and not just a plain text input. Also writing cmdline tools is rather easy compared to a usable GUI tool.
Genuine question: why not use grep, awk, sed, or any of the other gnu tools that can already do that?
You could, but maybe a good shell makes it easier than the external tool. Or maybe you use the shell to effectively combine the inputs and outputs of the other tools.
I guess that's convenient if you're only ever on one machine, I prefer commands that work (almost) everywhere!
Me too. I could never get into nushell or fish because they’re not posix and I don’t need to learn two ways to do something.
That's what I meant, using your shell to run command line tools to solve your issue at hand. And having a powerful shell with e.g. context dependend autocomplete (and a lot more) helps to speed up that task.