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From: cheeks@edsr.eds.com (Mark Costlow)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: A tirade about inefficient software & systems
Message-ID: <3341@tantalum.UUCP>
Date: 31 Oct 90 00:14:07 GMT
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I'm not going to reference anyone in particular, but I just have to put my
two cents in:

A couple times a week I come across some task, or am asked to do some task,
for which shell programming is a natural.  So, I whip out my favourite
shell (I won't tell you which one :-), and start glomming together various
instances of awk/sed/grep/du/df/wc/ps/etc, etc, etc. to get the job done.
Usually, the standard tools supplied by the OS will do what I need done,
but about once a month, one of the utilities will break (missing some vital
feature, has some stupid static table size limitation, or just plain dumps
core).  Typically what I do when this happens is prepend a "g" to the name
of the offending utility to use the GNU version of it, and almost without
fail, the gnu utility will do what I wanted to do, and FASTER too.  Not
just a little bit faster, but 2-10 TIMES faster.

So, more often than not, I reach for the GNU version of a utility if it
exists.  The only problem is that there's no GNU OS proper, so maintaining
the GNU stuff is almost like maintaining two versions of the OS
simultaneously (you know the story: The minute you throw away the system
awk, you stumble on a shell script from some random vendor that depends on
a bug in the system's awk :-).

So, there's my two cents.  I guess what I'd like to see is the OS vendors
incorporating more up-to-date algorithms in some of the old utilities
(egrep and awk seem to be the biggest offenders).  Or, a full-blown GNU OS
would be cool, but that's still quite a ways off.

Mark

PS:  I'm aware of PERL ... haven't had time to really get into it yet.
-- 
cheeks@edsr.eds.com    or     ...uunet!edsr!cheeks