Re: Possibly Off Topic Rant

[Bob Proulx]

Ray Parrish wrote:
> And as another note, even 'though I've used the -d switch to show only
> directories in the output I'm still getting filenames with it.

Please see the Coreutils FAQ on 'ls -d'.

  
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/#ls-_002dd-does-not-list-directories_0021

> I had to further read the info pages, ...

But the info doc is the main documentation.  You should start there
and not put it off until later.

> I remember programming in DOS batch language, and I never had this much
> trouble understanding the syntax because it was right there in the docs.

The DOS batch language is much simpler and is therefore easier to
understand.  But it is also much less powerful.  In my experience it
is much harder to use than Unix shells for more than very simple
things due to its limitations.  Easy things are easy but hard things
are very hard.

The Unix shell was created following the Unix philosophy which is to
design and build applications in modular layers.  This layered design
philosophy is much more flexible at the expense that the writer will
need to understand multiple layers in order to operate the system.
But if each layer is relatively small and simple by itself then
building them together into a more complex whole is easier than trying
to create a complete solution all at once without doing it modularly.

Here is an article describing this paradigm.

  
http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html#Opening-the-software-toolbox

The above is also in the coreutils info documentation.

  info coreutils 'Toolbox Introduction'

Bob

P.S. The best place for GNU coreutils specific discussions is on the
bug-coreutils mailing list.