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