{"id":6351,"date":"2024-06-19T09:22:36","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T15:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/?p=6351"},"modified":"2024-06-19T15:17:39","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T21:17:39","slug":"tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/2024\/06\/19\/tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. Small is Beautiful!<\/h3>\n

There’s a strong preference in the Unix community for small, simple tools. It’s a philosophy that emerged roughly at the same time as E.F.Schumacher’s classic reflection on economics.<\/p>\n

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The Unix Way<\/em><\/a> was a philosophy spread informally but also in books, some of which are on the shelves in the other room.<\/p>\n

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Bookshelves that line the walls floor to ceiling, interior designer recommendations to ditch them notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

2. Simplicity In Practice?<\/h3>\n

Simple software tools glued together in simple ways.<\/p>\n

For example, to remove all the PDF files in a directory except those ending in –<\/span>STUDENT<\/span> , you might assemble rm<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/em>, ls<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/em>, and grep<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/em> thusly<\/p>\n

rm<\/span><\/strong><\/em> -f `ls<\/span><\/strong><\/em> *.pdf | grep<\/span><\/strong><\/em> -v -STUDENT`<\/span><\/p>\n

And as I wrote the underlying automation for the next generation of my Algebra 2 guided notes, I embedded just such a snippet into a bash<\/span> script. Except that a non-fatal error message consistently showed when there were no PDF files to begin with.<\/p>\n

Bad juju. Can’t have error messages, fatal or not, lurking in the soul of the machine. But where was it coming from? Finding out was a drag, because it required disassembling the tools and individually checking them out.<\/p>\n

In the end, the solution was (as it often is) to use find<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/em>, a Swiss Army knife of complexity. No one remembers how to use it, ever. It is the antithesis of the Unix Way. <\/em>But with that single (complex) tool, the job was so much easier.<\/p>\n

find<\/span><\/strong><\/em> . -name “*.pdf” ! -name “*-STUDENT.pdf” -type f -delete<\/span><\/p>\n

And it reads better, doesn’t it? Bonus: no more error messages.<\/p>\n

Now, on to the math…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. Small is Beautiful! There’s a strong preference in the Unix community for small, simple tools. It’s a philosophy that emerged roughly at the same time as E.F.Schumacher’s classic reflection on economics. The Unix Way was a philosophy spread informally but also in books, some of which are on the shelves in the other room. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6351"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6351"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6357,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6351\/revisions\/6357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}