It is easy. Gets things done in a straightforward manner. However, the design of the command line switches is an everyday problem. Even for the tooling that is used more often, one is never able to memorize totally the switches required for common day-to-day actions.
For example, want to rsync something?
rsync -avvzP user@location1 ./
Want to decompress some .tar file?
tar -xvf something.tar
The above is already not friendly but still more or less doable with practice. But now ask yourself (attention: google not allowed):
How do you find files with a given extension inside a folder and sub-folders?
You see, in Unix (Linux, Mac, etc) this is NOT easy. Just like so many other commands, a very common task was not designed with an intuitive usage in mind. They work, but in so much as you learn an encyclopedia of switches. Sure, there exist manual pages and google/stackoverflow to help but what happened to simplicity in design?
In Windows/ReactOS one would type:
dir *.txt /s
In Unix/Linux this is a top answer:
find ./ -type f -name "*.txt"
source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/5927391
Great. It is spread everywhere this kind of complication for everyday tasks. Want to install something, need to type:
apt-get install something
Since we only use apt-get for installing stuff, why not?
apt-get something
Whenever designing your next command line app. Would help end-users if you list which usage scenarios will be more popular and reduce to bare minimum the switches. Some people argue that switches deliver consistency and this is a fact. However, one should perhaps balance consistency with friendliness in mind, which in the end turns end-users into happy-users.
Be nice, keep it simple.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Question:
What is the weirdest Unix command that really upsets you?
Noteworthy reactions to this post:
- Defending Unix against simpler commands:
http://leancrew.com/all-this/2016/03/in-defense-of-unix
- This post ended stirring a fight of Linux > Windows
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229025
No comments:
Post a Comment