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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2024

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  • You actually support my point by referring to manuals. The manual for find is more that thousand lines of text. Should I read it before first use and memorize all the peculiarities forever? Or should I check it every time I use find to see if there are comments specific to the current scenario? Both alternatives seem complex. Remember how I am complaining about unnecessary complexity? When using an alternative in a programming language I don’t have to bother with all that: I get a file handle and pass it to delete method.

    Many commenters on the internet say “you should read the manual”. I doubt they follow this advice. I won’t take you as an example because you claimed no expertise. But whenever someone says these words, ask them to compare find -delete and find rm without looking into manual, see what they say.


  • Remember how I was saying that good integration is difficult? Well, if you just “naively” integrate with rm then you get issues like “too many parameters passed to rm” or “there is a vulnerability if you manipulate filesystem while find is still running”. These are among the reasons a well-integrated -delete exists, as “impure” and “complex” as it is.



  • You know there are colors beyond black and white? There’s a spectrum of alternatives.

    I’m arguing for a little more singing and a little more dancing well-integrated solutions. Like the -delete parameter to the find tool is the step in the right direction. Or do you think that this parameter is superfluous and good old rm is perfectly fine?








  • So, it is me “missing the difference between professional software development and a QnD script” or the whole software industry? ;)

    ignore all of the failure modes and edge cases except those that a script is going to directly run into

    I’ve seen lots of cases of catastrophically wrong expectations of what the script will run into. Both for casual personal scripts, and professionally written scripts. I dare to claim that the majority of script authors cannot properly estimate this.