Re: Adding a 'D - Date' option to 'cat'

At 11:09 PM -0400 9/6/06, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>
>That's pretty much the basic Unix philosophy - a lot of small
>programs that can be chained together to do almost anything you can
>imagine, instead of putting all the POSSIBLE needed options into
>each program that MAY or MAY NOT need it.

Well, the proposed option to `cat' is already dead, but just
as an aside:

Notice what happens when some issue like this comes up.  The
unix philosophy is supposedly to champion lots of small utility
programs.  An issue like Julian's comes up, where no *small*,
well-designed utility can get the job done.  What does everyone
suggest?  Why, "Just load up a turing-complete multi-megabyte
executable like Perl [which FreeBSD won't even include in the
base OS because it's too much of a hassle], and then write/debug
your own perl script which can handle your job!".

Uh, perl is not a small utility program.  The fact is that unix
doesn't really deliver on it's own philosophy.  Unix wizards
constantly punt user questions off to *massive* programs which
have a billion options.  There is something very inconsistent
in that.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu