[colug-432] Nice Plain Text Columns and Avoiding NIH: expand: not

[Ethan Dicks]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Seth Hall <seth at icir.org> wrote:
> On Aug 29, 2011, at 12:51 PM, Stephen Potter wrote:
>> But, for CLI usage, how often do you really do
>> more than two commands?
> I can't speak for anyone else, but I do many piped commands very regularly.  But a lot of my work like this is in log processing so it's not uncommon for me to have a single command line that uses cat/zcat, awk, sed, sort, uniq, grep/zgrep, cut, and column in various combinations.

Speaking for myself, I'd say that at least 80% of my compound commands
are 2-3 terms, but daily, I do piped command streams with 4 or more
elements.  If I'm writing shell scripts and I start to see that much
complexity creeping in, I'll often switch to Perl.

... and I'm in favor of that initial 'cat' to enhance clarity for the
poor SOB at 03:00.

-ethan