The Unix Haters' Handbook

[Chuck Guzis]

> Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:04:01 -0400
> From: Sridhar Ayengar 

> That's bull.  There are ways to make grep output something like "No 
> matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it.  I suggest that 
> perhaps those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't use or
> understand pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't understand pipes.

If anything, my issue with the evolution of *nix is that the original 
philosophy of "write a bunch of simple tools and hook 'em together 
via pipes" seems to have been deprecated in the almost 30 years since 
I began using Unix.   There seems to be a trend of proliferating 
options.

Quick, who can recite from memory all of the switches and their 
meanings for GNU tar?  I can't.  Who can understand the tar man 
pages? Who knows it to be accurate for the particular incarnation of 
tar that they're using?

Cheers,
Chuck