If you browse through GNU documents, you sometimes come across strange ancient passages like

> "Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically. In most Unix utilities, “long lines are silently truncated”. This is not acceptable in a GNU utility. "

What do you suppose the ancients meant by this? Some have taken it as evidence that in ancient times before GNU, Unix tools were not in fact "doing one thing and doing it well" as the Unix priests so often claim. This of course is blasphemy and the guilty are punished accordingly... but are they wrong?

As if the bash syntax for simple string manipulation and piping and quoting and escaping and even determining if a string is empty wasn't unnecessarily complex.

As I said, the "Unix Philosophy" of plugging together artificially limited tools by pipes is intellectually bankrupt (and terribly inefficient). That was my whole point.

It is inefficient, but that doesn't matter much for interactive use. After a shell script reaches a dozen lines, it's time to port it to Python. If the job needs absolute performance you rewrite in a performant language instead.

I'm not sure why you are upset to be honest? What design would you prefer? This one seems to hit all use cases.

In another thread I mention that fish has math and string manipulation builtins.