Re: [gentoo-user] is a nice "place" :-D

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Alan.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 09:03:47PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 12:17 on Wednesday 18 May 2011, Neil Bothwick 
> did opine thusly:

> > On Tue, 17 May 2011 18:38:33 +0100, Stroller wrote:
> > > Not addressed at you, specifically, but it rather seems like sed &
> > > awk are much under-appreciated these days. I'd guess that this may
> > > be due to the changing nature of *nix users, but they seem to have
> > > "gone out of fashion". Aside from sed's simple replace, I have
> > > certainly never learned to do anything useful with them.

> > They both have a steep initial learning curve, which leads to their
> > adoption being put off. I put awk in the same category as screen, one
> > of those programs that you hear people going on about for years, but
> > always manage to put off trying them. Once you do try them, you use
> > them for everything but slicing bread.


> Add bash to that list.

> Have you read the full man page for the bloody thing?

You're not meant to read that man page through from beginning to end.
Anybody who could learn bash that way would be superhuman.
Unfortunately, the info pages for bash are not well organised.  So
beginners have to learn from books, many of which are not good.

And bash is about the most disorganised, arbitrary language around, full
of crazy little quirks and odd sytaxes.  And I love it.  ;-)

> No wonder most folk stop at launching it after login

> -- 
> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).