this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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You can do most things by combining simple cmdline tools. E.g. filter out some specific lines from all files in a directory, get the value after the second
:, write those to another file and then sort, deduplicate and count them.This may sound complicated, but it's pretty easy and fast if your are familiar with a shell. To be that efficient with your shell you want it to actually be powerful and not just a plain text input. Also writing cmdline tools is rather easy compared to a usable GUI tool.
Genuine question: why not use grep, awk, sed, or any of the other gnu tools that can already do that?
You could, but maybe a good shell makes it easier than the external tool. Or maybe you use the shell to effectively combine the inputs and outputs of the other tools.
I guess that's convenient if you're only ever on one machine, I prefer commands that work (almost) everywhere!
Me too. I could never get into nushell or fish because they’re not posix and I don’t need to learn two ways to do something.
That's what I meant, using your shell to run command line tools to solve your issue at hand. And having a powerful shell with e.g. context dependend autocomplete (and a lot more) helps to speed up that task.