[ale] I have a single shell command complex syntax winner

[Richard Bronosky]

I love one-liners! http://blog.bronosky.com/search?q=one-liners

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-01-26 at 11:25 -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:
>> I thought I spoke command line pretty well, but on another list I just
>> saw:
>>
>> dcfldd bs=32k conv=noerror,sync sizeprobe=if if=/dev/sda
>> of:='ewfacquirestream -c fast -d sha1 -D MAC20 -M physical -S 2000000
>> -l "/media/HD-PVU2/MAC20/MAC20.log.txt.hashes" -t
>> "/media/HD-PVU2/MAC20/MAC20" 2> /dev/null > /dev/null' errlog:='tee -a
>> "/media/HD-PVU2/MAC20/MAC20.log.txt" > /dev/null' hashlog:='tee -a
>> "/media/HD-PVU2/MAC20/MAC20.log.txt.hashes" > /dev/null'
>>
>> That is one hard to parse statement, at least for me.  I think it
>> launches 4 program instances without any of the normal connectors
>
> At one point, I used to be very much in the habit of constructing
> exceedingly complex command lines.  At a previous employer, we used many
> different types of (authentic) UNIX and (other) UNIX-like systems, but
> there was one rule that held true for all of them:  We (the support
> people) were not allowed to put shell scripts on the systems---not even
> in our home directories.  The reason that we were given was because
> "that would alter the platform in a non-change-controlled way".
> Personally that sounded like (hell, still does) a crock of crap.  But,
> we weren't allowed.
>
> So, to get around that, I would build one-liners.  The "parameters" to
> the one-liners were shell variables.  I'd kept a text file on my laptop
> that had the one-liners, a description of their inputs, and a
> description of their outputs, if there was indeed any output.  The most
> complex one started several (don't recall exactly how many) subshells
> and had many pipes both in and between the subshells.  It was rather
> nice to be able to paste in decaline-long commands and get something
> done in a decisecond that previously took 20 minutes or more to do
> manually.
>
> I'd taken to building these one liners, and then after I'd tested them
> sufficiently, I'd rewrite them as a well-formatted shell script that I
> would put in the developers' ticket queue, in the hopes that they would
> adopt the use of those shell scripts so that _everyone_ could benefit
> from the scripts.  Sadly, that never happened.  Oh, well.
>
> I am also pretty sure that if I still had a copy of those commands handy
> that I would probably have to spend 45 minutes or more going through
> them to figure out what they did.  Most of them were very specific to
> AT&T SVR4 systems, and I quickly realized that I could not do my testing
> on Linux, even after installing pdksh, because many of the core commands
> had slightly different output formats, and the custom commands that were
> on the systems did not exist, of course.
>
>        --- Mike
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>



-- 
.!# RichardBronosky #!.