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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

I've watched this command change repeatedly as you've been editing it to make it work.

This is a good example of why I didn't do this in the shell.

By looking through the git history of your project, it doesn't seem you got it correct the first time either. I don't think gluing "UNIX tools" together biggest strength is "make it work fast & on the first try", but "have independent tools that does 'one thing' well".

In relation to your tool, I think curl provides very many more features that are easily accessible through command flags than the limited subset of HTTP capabilities you expose (for example, basic auth or different set of headers). The same argument goes for mailing, setting headers or such.

With that said, tools that does one thing and does it well are the ones that gets used, personally I'd just prefer it to be function in <your-shell> instead :)

Yeah. The 'git log' really shows all the changes I had to make to the README. Oh, and an error message.

I mean, a tool can be really useful (I write tools this size all the time) but some of them needs tweaks forever. I just think some 'tweaks' are already solved by other projects, that's why using already written tools that are somewhat UNIX-y sounds like a good idea to me. That's what I tried to say; of course I don't want you to write a 100% complete program in the first commit, that would make everything I write look really bad in comparison. Just be prepared for that pull request that lands basic auth in your project, and the next PR after that :)

Oh, here's the programmer who never makes mistakes.

I dont know how to view or edit comment history but I never wrote anything in this comment about sending an email.

You could replace echo with sendmail to do that. Sorry if my point came across as callous to you

No need to apologize. There's basically always a way to do it in the shell.

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