Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 13:05:21 +0100 From: Simon Marlow <simonm@dcs.gla.ac.uk> To: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de> Cc: "Garrett A. Wollman" <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: from(1) Message-ID: <199509221206.FAA27393@freefall.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 21 Sep 1995 15:14:51 %2B0200." <199509211314.PAA05392@caramba.cs.tu-berlin.de>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Wolfram Schneider writes:
> Garrett A. Wollman writes:
> ><<On Wed, 20 Sep 1995 19:37:08 +0200, Wolfram Schneider <wosch@cs.tu-berlin.
> de> said:
> >
> >> - Option '-c' print a count of matching lines
> >
> >Use wc(1).
>
>
> An option is better than a pipe
I disagree entirely. The generality provided by pipes and pipe
combinators far outweighs the slight performance gain by implementing
the options directly. How many other programs are you going to add
'-c' to? What about the programs where '-c' is already taken, and you
have to use an inconsistent flag?
In Un*x, to count lines, one uses wc(1).
> a) in a perl script, a pipe force system to use sh -c
> instead exec/fork
If efficiency is that important, the Perl script should be counting
the lines itself. This is trivial in Perl.
> b) for aliases
>
> alias fb='from -tcs owner-freebsd-security'
>
> is simpler than [for bash]
> fb () {
> from -tcs owner-freebsd-security "$@" | wc -l
> }
> most people forget the "$@"
A valid point, but this is a shell problem and not worth sacrificing
the philosophy of an operating system for.
Cheers,
Simon
--
Simon Marlow simonm@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Research Assistant http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~simonm/
finger for PGP public key
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199509221206.FAA27393>