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Re^4: OT: Advantage of not expanding wildcard in the shellby Aristotle (Chancellor) |
on Jan 28, 2005 at 20:41 UTC ( [id://426098]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Well, when working with find, xargs is a natural choice anyway. And I've only ever needed to reach for xargs once where I wouldn't otherwise have just because the number of files in a single directory had grown too large.
That's a matter of practice. If you keep avoiding shell, you'll never learn it, and the things shell does well cost much more effort to do with a more fully featured language like Perl, so on the bottom line you are wasting a lot of energy. (Cf. false laziness.) But if you don't need it often to begin with, then again it's a wasted investment indeed. The phenomenon that it takes even a well versed shell user a few tries to piece a complex command together is pretty common; but I like doing it that way. To quote Larry, “The fact that it takes a little hard work from the programmer to make the computer do hard work should not be a consideration when the payoff is big.”
That was one of the two primary motivations for my sticking with a vi, namely, Vim (the other being that vi's model of thinking about text manipulation feels like a closer match to how I think when I edit, though modal editing still takes getting used to at first). While working without my .vimrc on foreign system is sometimes annoying, it is not a real problem: the default configuration is extensive and pretty sensible so just give me a vi and I'm ready to rumble. If in the course of a task I really miss some personal settings then they're easy to reconstruct anyway, since any task only involves a subset of all of my preferred options. Reconstructing it just takes a few quick :sets. The choice has served me so well already in the few years since I made it that I'm at least as fanatical about Vim as I am about Perl. First thing I do on any machine I have to work on is install Vim if it's not there already. And Vim is available for just about every possible platform with a full-sized keyboard. I don't expect to ever be stranded without it regardless of where time takes me, as oposed to other great but platform specific editors. If you haven't made a serious attempt to get accustomed to it, do yourself a favour and try it. Makeshifts last the longest.
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