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Comment by nohackeratall | Hacker News Reader

And then you have ImageMagick where the order of flags and options is a science by itself.

Also ps. Everyone uses their own incantation and never strays from it. I use `ps aux` and used to use `ps -def` on Solaris. Some options require a dash, some don’t, it’s such a confusing CLI I never bothered to learn more.

EDIT: also why is `ps` default output so useless? With no arguments it only prints a couple processes and that's it. I have no idea what it's supposed to show me. Talk about bad UX.

In case you're curious, the differences basically stem from BSD and Solaris/POSIX having different command syntaxes, and GNU/Linux's ps command trying to implement both. `ps -ef` is the Solaris syntax, while `ps aux` is from BSD.

Almost. `ps ax` was original Unix form (BSD did add `u`, and later accepted `-` on the flags). `ps -ef` was AT&T System III and descendants.

Regarding default ps output: remember how people were using Unix in the old days. Logged in via a text terminal on a multiuser system, 99% the only processes you care about are those associated with the current terminal, and that's what ps shows by default. You might have half a dozen backgrounded programs running in that terminal, but that's about it.

Now, my X sessions always have a dozen xterms running and plain ps isn't very useful, but it might break scripts if they changed it...

Yeah this is the problem, the 'terminal' used to be the box/machine in-front of you. Now a 'terminal' is pretty much just a window or tab most of the time.

Have you tried `ps faux`? :)

> Talk about bad UX.

I think you could say this for CLIs in general. While we can all agree that the CLI is great for tasks that require repetition; it's just a PITA for any one-time task. When you just need to do something once and as soon as possible, the manual-help-type-run loop gets tiresome quickly.

Passing options to a program so it can do what most users would want it to do in the first place is nonsensical, and yet that describes the behaviour of many if not all of *nix's tools. It should be the other way around: do what is expected by default, and provide options for different, more uncommon use-cases. Though I suppose this is also a form of baggage from the past that it's very difficult to get rid off because of backwards compatibility.

Indeed, I passionately hate programs where the order of the options and files/arguments matter just as much as the options themselves.

Given that ImageMagick can describe a sequence of operations (much like commands piped together), the order is obviously significant.

The exact same holds for ffmpeg command-line.

The `find` command is extremely useful, but user-friendly, it is not.

  $ find -type f Data/
  find: paths must precede expression: `Data/'
  find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate `-type'?

sigh

I think Imagemagick and maybe git are where I require a web search most often, along with hope that someone has had the same need before.

Well magick is more a single live scripting language with multiple paths. While it works, I think it’s the wrong tool for the job

So you are saying Imagemagick is the wrong tool for any job then? (I ask this because the OP didn't reference any particular task). I would disagree with that. Like many media-related command line tools, it does a lot and therefore has a fairly involved command line interface, but I have found it very useful over the years for processing multiple images (and sometimes even just individual ones).

ffmpeg too! Been doing a lot with it lately and I barely even feel like I have scratched the service of the ffmpeg argument science.

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