ugh.book

164 csh, pipes, and find

“There are no Unix experts, in the naive sense of an exalted

group whose knowledge is exhaustive and who need not learn

more.”

Here I must disagree. It is clear that an attempt to master the absurdi-

ties of Unix would exhaust anyone.

Some programs even go out of their way to make sure that pipes and file

redirection behave differently from one another:

From: Leigh L. Klotz <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: | vs. <

Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 11:37:14 PDT

collard% xtpanel -file xtpanel.out < .login

unmatched braces

unmatched braces

unmatched braces

3 unmatched right braces present

collard% cat .login | xtpanel -file

xtpanel.out

collard%

You figure it out.

Find

The most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many

times you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage

to lose consciousness. It just goes on and on.

—Patrick Sobalvarro

Losing a file in a large hierarchical filesystem is a common occurrence.

(Think of Imelda Marcos trying to find her pink shoes with the red toe rib-

bon among all her closets.) This problem is now hitting PC and Apple users

with the advent of large, cheap disks. To solve this problem computer sys-

tems provide programs for finding files that match given criteria, that have

a particular name, or type, or were created after a particular date. The

Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows have powerful file locators that

are relatively easy to use and extremely reliable. These file finders were