this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
43 points (78.7% liked)

Programming

17022 readers
253 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PaX@hexbear.net 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool's built-in usage information.

[–] ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I would disagree, or rather: it depends. You can print the --help of bash, but will that actually tell you anything about bash except a really superficial subset of flags? In the same way that the author argues that the help of his tool is too long to be useful, the help of bash is to short for the same reason. He argues that "cloud tools have a gazillion options where UNIX tools have good defaults". Bash has a gazillion options and no good defaults. As a matter of fact, bash on defaults is fairly dangerous. Yet, it is at the heart of most Unix systems today I'd argue.

[–] PaX@hexbear.net 3 points 11 months ago

Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.

[–] otl@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 11 months ago

Definitely depends, yeah. bash is a huge piece of software that - for me - feels a bit out of place in other systems closer to original unix. Interesting ones are rc and even plain old /bin/sh provided by something like busybox.