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What is the most crude Unix tool you've ever used?

2 points by wkoszek ↗ HN
Something with million dark command line switches, something that makes you cry and poop, but something that you know has the functionality you need and you're too busy or lazy to reimplement it as a legit script. Something that makes you cringe and is ugly as one liner. Something that is super useful.

6 comments

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qwertyuiop924
That sounds like a very deliberate description of find...
wkoszek
For some stuff I sometimes wonder if the author can actually remember the logic behind e.g.: flags order or the syntax.
DrScump
sed and awk command strings can be quite long.

One can do a lot combining find with cpio or tar to selectively extract files for backup.

I don't consider any of this to be "crude"; I find it quite elegant.

cartman82
ln

It just does too many things. Confusing switches. Confusing order of arguments. Easy to mess up.

Ugh.

paulrpotts
tar has a confusing ordering of parameters (as compared to other UNIX tools) and handling of switches. It's one of those tools that I don't use that often, so I always have to look up examples.

I'm not the only one... see https://xkcd.com/1168/

qwertyuiop924
czf, and xzf are all you really need to know most of the time. Oh, and sometimes cjf and xjf.