What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used?

Posted by wkoszek on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @04:57PM
from the self-post dept.

Something with million dark command line switches, something that makes you cry and poop, but something that you know has the functionality you need and you're too busy or lazy to reimplement it as a legit script. Something that makes you cringe and is ugly as one liner. Something that is super useful.

( 6 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used? by DrScump on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @06:03PM (#12648339)

sed and awk command strings can be quite long.

One can do a lot combining find with cpio or tar to selectively extract files for backup.

I don't consider any of this to be "crude"; I find it quite elegant.

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Re:What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used? by qwertyuiop924 on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @04:59PM (#12647816)

That sounds like a very deliberate description of find...

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Re:What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used? by wkoszek on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @02:41PM (#12746470)

For some stuff I sometimes wonder if the author can actually remember the logic behind e.g.: flags order or the syntax.

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Re:What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used? by paulrpotts on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @06:13PM (#12648426)

tar has a confusing ordering of parameters (as compared to other UNIX tools) and handling of switches. It's one of those tools that I don't use that often, so I always have to look up examples.

I'm not the only one... see https://xkcd.com/1168/

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Re:What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used? by qwertyuiop924 on Thursday October 06, 2016 @09:07AM (#12652081)

czf, and xzf are all you really need to know most of the time. Oh, and sometimes cjf and xjf.

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Re:What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used? by cartman82 on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @06:07PM (#12648382)

It just does too many things. Confusing switches. Confusing order of arguments. Easy to mess up.

Ugh.

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