I agree. I always feel like my use of shell scripting and unix tools to perform basic tasks is so much less than it could be. I enjoy the ideas of portability and speed that comes from these tools, but often I just want to get the task done and end up writing something in Python.
Things that always get me:
- Meaningful whitespace in bash.
- Differences between Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities. (Perils of using a Mac, I guess, I know I can install the GNU versions of most things but ugh)
- Not being able to just use PCRE everywhere
- The magic of awk
- Differences in parameter/flag placement between different tools
- The amount of edge cases that you have to account for, usually to do with various levels of globbing, or special
characters or even spaces in file names or utility output.
- More, I'm sure, that I can't think of right now.
there's just this underlying sense of inconsistency that I have when dealing with these tools that I feel results in me always having to check the man pages or StackOverflow whenever I want to string together more than a couple of operations.
Things that always get me:
- Meaningful whitespace in bash.
- Differences between Mac BSD-derived utilities and POSIX utilities. (Perils of using a Mac, I guess, I know I can install the GNU versions of most things but ugh)
- Not being able to just use PCRE everywhere
- The magic of awk
- Differences in parameter/flag placement between different tools
- The amount of edge cases that you have to account for, usually to do with various levels of globbing, or special characters or even spaces in file names or utility output.
- More, I'm sure, that I can't think of right now.
there's just this underlying sense of inconsistency that I have when dealing with these tools that I feel results in me always having to check the man pages or StackOverflow whenever I want to string together more than a couple of operations.