[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hello Bakul, Ralph,

On 1/4/23 19:01, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Jan 4, 2023, at 7:19 AM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> A lot of the time, POSIX find's ‘-exec foo {} +’ suffices and runs
>> foo with as many arguments as will just fit under argv[]s limits,
>> like xargs by default and unlike find's one-at-a-time behaviour with
>> ‘-exec foo {} \;’.
> 
> I often run further transformations before executing
> some command on selected files. For example
> 
> find . -type f -name '*.[csh]' | grep -l foo | xargs wc -l

I find find(1)'s options too complex.  I prefer composing even more.  I very 
often find myself writing:

     find . -type f | grep '\.[ch]$' | grep -l foo | xargs ...

> 
> Composability rules!

Yup it does :)

For me, the only shell feature that matters is the pipe.  I also like using 
bash(1) for it's pipefail feature (and I also usually enable lastpipe).  But 
things like globbing and regex support, I don't like them at all.

I wish shells didn't supoprt globbing, and that glob(1) would be a standalone 
program still today.  It would simplify much of the quoting issues if most 
characters were just characters to the shell.

Cheers,

Alex