Whatever hacky script you are writing already exists in GNU Core Utilities
When I think of bash, I think of writing hacky scripts that do random things utilizing “bash commands”. It turns out that the parts of bash that “do stuff” such as echo, cut, cat are part of a larger program called GNU Core Utilities.
The GNU Core Utilities are the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system.These are the core utilities which are expected to exist on every operating system.Source: Coreutils - GNU core utilities I am working on a general purpose backup utility and this evening I was moments away from writing something like this:
perl -e (print split("/\//", "/foo/bar/baz.tar.gz")
My goal was to try to extract the base file name from a given directory (I recognize that that code does not actually do that). Then I realized that this was pure madness and there had to be a better way. This is when I discovered the handy basename program. It simply does the needful. GNU Core Utilities is full of all sorts of gems such as this one. My main takeaway from this is to read the entire GNU Core Utilities manual so I can stop writing horrible things.
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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it. Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence). Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience: An opinion dismantled by reality. An artif…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 15, 2026“To build a thing that immediately feels like you’ve had it forever is very hard to do.”
What Version History, a YouTube show from The Verge, does really well is revisiting older tech products from today’s perspective without allowing nostalgia to take over. This episode about the Western Electric 500 – the canonical American land…
via Unsung April 15, 2026Generated by openring