Hacker News Reader

Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

    > Take for example this one-liner:
    > [program listing...]
    > In this condensed program of 4 lines, the following happens:

Right a "one" liner I see...

once it gets above roughly 100 characters you are no longer allowed to call it a "one liner"

and style note putting the pipe"|" at the end of the command instead of the beginning acts as a natural break and lets you avoid the backslash escaped newline nonsense.

    curl ... |
    jq ... |
    awk ....

    curl ... \
    | jq ... \
    | awk ...

View on HN

If we're nitpicking the number of lines, I'm way more confused because there is no obvious way that I can see for that to be 4 lines. Either it's a (very long) one liner, or it is as rendered a 5 line example (with the lines starting with curl, jq, sqlite3, sqlite3, and xargs). Where is 4 coming from?

(To be clear, this sounds like a complaint, and it kind of is, but I think the article is actually quite good if we just ignore that one basically irrelevant detail)

TIL about the pipe/newline, thanks. Edited.

Another advantage of pipes at the end is that you can comment lines and the full pipeline still works.

Some time ago I wrote a bunch of tips to make more ergonomic bash scripts: https://raimonster.com/scripting-field-guide/index.html

Also, Perl's diamond operator does the DWIM thing with files/stdin, and it's used directly as a line iterator. It handles multiple files (or none) in a row, which is a nice plus :) https://perlmaven.com/the-diamond-operator

Reply on news.ycombinator.com