Why is head considered harmful?
>Here is a hint: complexity is the bane of all software, simplicity is the most important quality.
Isn't head one of the simplest tools one can imagine? Certainly simpler than sed.
>Here is a hint: complexity is the bane of all software, simplicity is the most important quality.
Isn't head one of the simplest tools one can imagine? Certainly simpler than sed.
To answer bbanyc too, grep existed before sed. Grep showed off the power of pipes, but sed came along after pipes were well-established and people thought "Wouldn't it be great to use ed between pipes?"
The argument in harmful.cat-v.org seems to be "don't add pointless junk," but for my part I'd be happy to use a unix with sed but no grep. I plan to look a little deeper than that though. For one thing, although I like the Plan 9 shell and shell tools, when writing scripts I often find myself dipping into awk because it's a more normal programming language and as such it's just easier for so many tasks. I also respect Rob Pike's opinion; when asked what happened to unix's tool-oriented approach, he replied, "That approach is dead and the eulogy was delivered by Perl." I guess like many others I want a language which also happens to function as a decent shell.