On Fri, 05 Jul 2019 13:33:21 +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> For a one-off quick task, automating it would be more tedious.

But you did it anyway, even though you didn't need the results!
(Don't change, your code snippets are great.)

> I learnt by reading books.  Pre-Internet.  The authors back then
> typically put a lot of effort into providing a coherent progression
> through the subject.

That's exactly why I think books (and courses) are valuable. I don't 
see them as a thing of the past. Other resources can sometimes provide 
quick answers, or an overview of current thinking, but I tend to turn 
to books when I want a solid, baseline understanding of a well-
developed topic.

The main difficulty I have with books is discovering the right ones, 
and I suppose I was fishing for a book recommendation, so thank you 
for recommending 'The Unix Programming Environment'.

There seems to be a copy of it in the library at Bournemouth 
University.
https://capitadiscovery.co.uk/bournemouth-ac/items/91529

At some point I will head over there to have a read and see what's 
nearby on the shelves; that usually turns up something good. (If I can 
figure out how to navigate the ever-changing maze of new buildings on 
their campus.)

> This is a bug that you may like to report

Good point. I'll see about doing that later.


On Fri, 05 Jul 2019 14:05:30 +0100, Bob Dunlop wrote:
> The command was simply "ldd /usr/bin/nvi" which shows the list of
> object dependencies, then cut and paste library names I'm interested
> in into the size command.

That makes sense. I thought there might have been a magic one-liner 
that knew which ones to omit, but in hindsight I suppose you need 
quite a bit of context to decide which libraries are relevant, so it's 
not as plausible as I thought.


On Fri, 05 Jul 2019 14:44:22 +0100, John Carlyle-Clarke wrote:
> You reminded me that a few days ago I listed the files in a core
> package on a server (looking for a missing utility) and saw a few
> things in the list that I didn't immediately recognise. I thought
> at the time, "That would be a good way to learn about utilities
> that I don't know exist".

That's true. Package management is a good way to find things, and 
there is usually some kind of categorisation in place as well. 
Certainly a useful tool to keep at hand.

Patrick

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