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From: dce@mips.UUCP (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: net.sources
Subject: Re: shell printf - a sensible solution
Message-ID: <210@quacky.mips.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Mar-87 16:01:03 EST
Article-I.D.: quacky.210
Posted: Wed Mar 18 16:01:03 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Mar-87 02:11:08 EST
References: <5008@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: dce@quacky.UUCP (David Elliott)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 47

In article <5008@brl-adm.ARPA> dm@bfly-vax.bbn.com writes:
>
>John Andrew Rosauer <johnr%metro.oz@bbn.com>, writes:
>
>>People should spend a few minutes thinking to see if something can be
>>done using available utilities rather than immediately writing
>>thousands of lines of C. It's wasting someone's money.
>
>Having spent that time thinking, one should realize that, like echo,
>printf should be faster than starting up awk.  To do otherwise is
>wasting someone's time.

With machine speed increasing all of the time, this argument is
becoming obsolete. Until we all have 20% of a 5 mips machine, it's
still valid. Then again, how much of a speed difference are you
talking about? Did you benchmark it? How often do you use printf?
On my system, the command

	time awk 'BEGIN {printf "hello, world\n" ; exit}'

gives 0 for all times.

>Look, ``the UNIX philosophy'' does NOT mean bending existing utilities
>to do poorly what a simple C program can do well.  It is perfectly
>fine to prototype the function one wants using the suite of tools that
>UNIX comes packaged with.  However, once you've done that prototype,

On the other hand, there is another type of waste involved, and there
is an issue of portability.

An object file certainly takes up more disk space than a shell script
that uses awk, and it costs to have the source and the makefile and
the manual page. It also costs maintenance. If I were to add it to
my system product, it would cost in other ways, such as software
manufacturing costs.

As for portability, I'm not talking about whether or not the printf
command is portable, but whether or not I can expect it to always
be available. There was a case last year in which our local version
of the BSD 'install' command used the local printf command (yes, it's
been written a number of times), and I was pressured to add it to
our system. I did, and the command worked fine. Later, when we
installed it on a clean machine, it was found to be broken.
-- 
			David Elliott

UUCP: 	{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!dce, DDD:  	408-720-1700