Am 09.09.2010 22:28, schrieb Grant Edwards:
> On 2010-09-09, Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net> wrote:
> 
>> When you look closer at `sort`, it is actually a quite impressive
>> tool. It sorts in-memory for small amounts of data and switches to
>> temporary files for larger. It can even compress those files to save
>> disk space.
>>
>> And it is still faster than most "business-grade" software for
>> importing data into data warehouses.
>>
>> Throw `cut`, `paste`, `join` and `grep` into the mix and you can
>> build your own relational database system based on shell scripts ;)
> 
> Sort of linke /rdb:   http://www.rdb.com/
> 

Interesting. I've just read the paper they have posted.

You know what I'd really like to do? Build a graphical dataflow-centric
programming language for generating shell scripts. Since dataflows are
the real strength of shells, I figure it would be a neat tool for
improving more complex tasks. Usually I resort to temporary files when
stuff gets more complicated than a simple sequential pipe. That really
hurts performance. A more abstract representation could really help in
those situations.

Well, I figure someone has already done this with Eclipse GMF or
something like that and I just don't know it. Well, whatever. Nice to
know such stuff exists, though.

Thanks for the pointer ;)