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

[Richard Troth]

I commonly use more than two stages even at a shell prompt.

Even if not required, I often use 'cat' instead of "<" for the
consistency of stage|stage|stage syntax. It's easier for my eyes to
parse just "|" than to also parse "<".

But w/r/t scripting, there's no way to know for sure which method
works best (spelled out or "tight" with coolness) for your crew until
you *are* the poor SOB at 3AM Ethan and Rick mention.  Usually,
verbose works better.  Depends on whether you are all a bunch of shell
gurus or noobs.

What is sad is to have written a script for excruciating clarity and
then get someone to dis your scripting hygiene as "too verbose".

-- Rick;   <><





On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 12:51, Stephen Potter <spp at unixsa.net> wrote:
> On 8/29/2011 12:39 PM, Rob Funk wrote:
>> A lot of times I'll write scripts that look something like:
>> cat foo |\
>>    filter --somehow |\
>>    another-filter --some-other-way |\
>>    more-filtering --with-more-options
>>
>> And it's nice to be able to easily vary the source (e.g. cat, echo, curl)
>> separately from the filters, with a direct pipeline from beginning to end.
>
> If you're chaining multiple commands in a script, I can see the utility
> of having the initial cat there so the input doesn't get completely
> lost.  That's actually one of the first really good reasons I've heard
> for using cat in a pipe!  But, for CLI usage, how often do you really do
> more than two commands?
>
> filter foo | other-filter
>
> -spp
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