Apparently, though unproven, at 22:15 on Wednesday 18 May 2011, Alan Mackenzie did opine thusly:
> Hi, Alan. > > On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 09:03:47PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > Apparently, though unproven, at 12:17 on Wednesday 18 May 2011, Neil > > Bothwick > > > > did opine thusly: > > > On Tue, 17 May 2011 18:38:33 +0100, Stroller wrote: > > > > Not addressed at you, specifically, but it rather seems like sed & > > > > awk are much under-appreciated these days. I'd guess that this may > > > > be due to the changing nature of *nix users, but they seem to have > > > > "gone out of fashion". Aside from sed's simple replace, I have > > > > certainly never learned to do anything useful with them. > > > > > > They both have a steep initial learning curve, which leads to their > > > adoption being put off. I put awk in the same category as screen, one > > > of those programs that you hear people going on about for years, but > > > always manage to put off trying them. Once you do try them, you use > > > them for everything but slicing bread. > > > > Add bash to that list. > > > > Have you read the full man page for the bloody thing? > > You're not meant to read that man page through from beginning to end. Um, I did .... > Anybody who could learn bash that way would be superhuman. I doubt I learned much though. I even took the effort to reformat it as an OOo doc so I could find stuff and give it to others. It was an interesting exercise, not necessary an interesting *learning* exercise > Unfortunately, the info pages for bash are not well organised. So > beginners have to learn from books, many of which are not good. > > And bash is about the most disorganised, arbitrary language around, full > of crazy little quirks and odd sytaxes. And I love it. ;-) The difference between bash and perl? Perl was inspired by a linguist, who at least puts his foot down at the truly crazy suggestions. Bash has no such thing. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
