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points by forrestthewoods 2 days ago | 0 comments
Great explanation. This affirms my biases that shell scripting and everything-is-strings is a mistake. Horrific.
[–] Woodi 2 days ago
Shell is for humans to read and act on it.

Not to programmatically parse 'ls' output or some /proc/some/file.

Eg. git started as Perl scripts then moved to C to realy have data straight from C calls from system.

So for example all Internet things calling "openssl -some -options ...." are pure trash :>>

[–] JoBrad 1 day ago
Even good, well-founded intentions can end terribly. The mistake is doubling down on those decisions when the mistake has become obvious.

I am also in the camp that CLI tools should return objects that can be parsed (by the shell or otherwise).