Yup, find is magic

Post #323,558 by crazy 3/27/10 7:46:21 AM Reply	Yup, find is magic I know sysadmins who will craft the most amazing find scripts. Hate them. Hate them. The scripts, not the admins. I could spend an hour reading the find manual, and still not be sure of the exact final results of what it will pull, especially when modifying someone else's script. Find is sooooo coool. Especially when we went from standard unix find to gnu find. And when you start using those booleans, joined with escaped parens and quotes, oh my it gets pretty. There were a few years we had to have both the solaris utils and the gnu utils in different paths. If a system packaged scripts used a gnu util, we'd be fucked. And the same vice versa. Can you tell I've been burned and try to opt for local coded black box utils (which log their decisions and drop a stat file for whatever they did), even if a system util in a multistage pipe will work? I'm not saying I don't use find, sure I do. But I shy away from multiple decisions to choose or exclude a file in a single find command. I never want to look at my boss and say: Yeah, the script that was supposed to archive off and delete those files REALLY got everyone, and here's the file counts. And by the way, the fact someone in the other building said it deleted but did not really save the file must be bullshit, because this code looks fine. Really, it's fine. No, I didn't write it, but the guy who did was very good. Huh, you want me to explain it to you? Sure, gimme a sec..... (uh oh, I'm fucked, no way to to explain this little snippet, I'm not really sure what it is doing....) Um, never mind, I can't be sure, give me an hour to run some tests....
Post #323,570 by pwhysall 3/27/10 10:18:13 AM Reply	s/magic/magic mushrooms/ I love and hate find in equal measure. It's an abusive relationship we have.
Post #323,595 by scoenye 3/27/10 8:40:27 PM Reply	My feelings exactly aboout Perl ;-) Just like Arabic, where you clear your throat and discover you accidentally ordered a cab to the airport? It is the only languange I know where you can bang your head against the keyboard and produce valid code...
Post #323,603 by static 3/28/10 6:34:49 AM Reply	I've tried to learn Perl several times. Every time, I just about give up because I can already do the task in bash, awk, php or icon so why am I bothering with perl? :-/ Still, great respect for what's been achieved and all that. Just not my cup-of-tea. Wade. Q:Is it proper to eat cheeseburgers with your fingers? A:No, the fingers should be eaten separately.
Post #323,621 by crazy 3/28/10 6:06:51 PM Reply	Learning Perl is like learning a core language facility Sure, you CAN type line noise. Or you can use it for a far higher level of grunting. Or it can be poetry. Pretty much like any very expressive language. Those that have spent years programming in straight jackets (or constricted pipe lines with an occasional escape to some 'C') it is a godsend. Kind of like AWK. I spent years grokking cut, paste, sort, uniq, tr, etc, etc. But the AWK man pages sucked, and each time I tried to use it, I found myself falling back into what I knew. And then I got the MS-DOS MKS toolkit, which includes really good docs for AWK. 2 years later, I fell into Perl, with an AWK mindset. That worked. Keep in mind, Perl is an organic aggregation of many unix utilities, then tied together by a single mind. Some utilities, like find, have been turning into a callback engine. http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Find.html
Post #323,626 by malraux 3/28/10 7:08:18 PM Reply	What's the point? When there are scripting languages that are just as expressive, just as powerful, and a hell of a lot easier to read and understand? Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #323,627 by crazy 3/28/10 7:12:26 PM Reply	Ah, welcome to the expanding fray The point isn't to use Perl. The point is to use something better than a stack of error prone pipes, when possible, for the big tasks that they were never envisioned for. I use perl, and am happy to help in that direction, because it is what I know. I am NOT positioning it as the best of the class. Given a fresh start, it would be python or ruby for me.
Post #323,642 by pwhysall 3/29/10 1:08:40 AM Reply	I hopped from Perl to Python... ...when I had to recycle some well-commented and neatly written Perl that was a few years old. I had to do a code walkthrough just to work out what the hell I was on about. I believe the words "fuck this shit" may have slipped out. I can pick up my old Python code and understand it straight away, by contrast. Not that I've written code of any description for a couple of years, mind...
Post #323,643 by crazy 3/29/10 4:32:23 AM Reply	Yeah, but I was under the impression you didn't consider yourself a programmer. So any code switch is to be taken with a lot of questions. Which I don't feel like asking, so I'll drop it.
Post #323,651 by pwhysall 3/29/10 9:03:51 AM Reply	No, it's fine. I don't consider myself a programmer. I switched because the occasional, sporadic nature of that sort of work meant that I often had to get back up to speed with a bit of code with as little difficulty as possible, in as short a timeframe as possible. I was better at writing Perl than I was at Python, but I could read Python code after the fact better than I could Perl. I could probably have circumvented it by commenting my Perl properly, and using the long version of the inbuilt operators, but hey. That'd have been too easy. I did find Python's regex stuff nicer to use than Perl's, though. Which is not what I expected at all.
Post #323,705 by static 3/29/10 6:57:59 PM Reply	Quite. I've been known to say that if you know a complex tool like Perl well, then go right ahead and use it for your own scripting purposes. Most of my pipe-like processing is one-off and involves SQL and numerous trips through an editing session in vi (regexp replace FTW! when they work...). If it has to become something re-usable, then it gets turned into something much more robust, like a PHP script or maybe a bash script. I leave little pipe tools to things they are good at (grep comes to mind). Wade. Q:Is it proper to eat cheeseburgers with your fingers? A:No, the fingers should be eaten separately.

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