wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Feel the awesomeness.

Mi-cro-soft. Oh yeah.

Linux used to be "cancer" but now it's OK. Check out "Azure". You want VM's? Linux VM's? Sure, we got that. Whatever you want, we got it.

Trust us, we know what we're doing. We're the good guys. Just tell us what you want. Where do you want to go today?

You want Skype? No problem. We have made Skype better. Just for you!

wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Like I said, it's relatively easy today. But how about going forward?

There will be lots more bots and lots more usages. Things might not be so simple. For example, some sites might exclude all search engine bots except a chosen few despite the fact they all honor robots.txt and behave essentially the same.

(BTW, if by "text file" you mean robots.txt, isn't that an exclusion list? You seem to be saying it's an inclusion list.)

wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

The solution I often contemplate is to address the process by which the data is created. (Let's assume we're talking about data you would find on the web.) That is, why don't we impose rules on that process? Why can't we "mandate" that the output be structured data from the get go? Instead we allow vast quantities of unstructered data to be created and then we try to normalize it. I know this is a radical view, but it could make sense in some circumstances.

I disagree with your comment about CSV. But it's impossible to have a meaningful argument unless you provide an example: Give me a job to do, a CSV file and let me have a go at it. I'm serious. Post a link to a CSV file, define a task and let's see what we can do just using plain ole UNIX. Could be a fun exercise.

As for your hypothetical command, I do not understand what is so difficult about this. The stat command is what you want, not ls. No self-respecting UNIX user would parse ls when he can use stat (I recommend the BSD one over GNU.).

But here's what I would do:

1. If your UNIX filenames have spaces in them, rename them. There is no sensible reason to leave spaces in filenames in UNIX. Fix this first before it becomes a problem.

2. Write a one-liner and save it as a function, perhaps in your .profile, or maybe in RCS, or save it as a script. There's so many ways to manipulate output as a stream. Pick one that suits your tastes. That's the beauty of UNIX. Make your own solutions as you go. There is no right or wrong answer. It is a form of customization. My choice will no doubt make some people cringe. Assuming there's no user named "[0-9]M":

   whatever(){ ls -lhS |tr '\011' '\040'|sed '/ [0-9]M /!d' ;}

or save what's between the brackets as a file named "whatever". Maybe you save it in a directory called "x" and add that to your PATH. Then you do

   . whatever

Of course how long the list of files is going to be makes a difference. I might take a different approach if the output was going to be an enormous list.

There are so many ways to get what you're after. The point is that you should be able to tap out a one-liner that does the job. Maybe it takes a few iterations to get the right output. Tweak it until the output is what you want. Viewing command-line history is perfect for seeing the process of creating a one-liner to manipuate output. You can see the line grow incrementally as you build it, until you finally have the output you want. This sort of history allows you to go back to any stage in the process. If you're a vi fan, you can use vi-mode on the command line to move around the line quickly as you edit. Eventually you can hit "v" and edit the thing visually in your EDITOR, then save it. I've built over 700 useful functions this way and the number keeps growing.

I do understand there should be a way to "extract" the file size column the way Pike decribes in the article. To do this I think you have to free yourself from "line-oriented" thinking and imagine another type of structure. And I think using another language you can do it. But for something as simple as this -- manipulating ls command output (cf. manipulating large datasets) -- an "ugly" one-liner suits me fine. The more you use the boring old utilities the more you can get them to do.

Regular Expressions are indeed "crude". But, to me, that is just fine in a lot of cases.

wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

"Benign"?

What would a malignant dictatorship be like?

wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I could not agree more with your comment. There's not a problem with text. Why do people pretend there is? They often only achieve making other people's jobs more difficult. Text is what people can read. People do not read binary. When something goes wrong, debugging binary formats becomes insanely cumbersome.

The concept of lines is a human one. It is how humans parse. If humans could parse without needing the concept of a "line" then, e.g., there would be no problems with programming in C which has very shaky support for the concept of "lines".

But there are problems as we all know. It's proof that people do need to think in terms of "lines". Even though the computer does not need them. The only "problem" with this is that people are not computers.

I'm not sure anyone outside of the most unrealistic nerds would agree that this is a "problem".

1. As for the paper, I can think of at least one tool/language to work with text that does keep data in a binary format while one performs a series of transformations. It's not line-based. And I would guess that Mr. Pike does not know how to use it. It's fast and efficient. Probably faster than sam.

wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

A company that relies on a bot that accesses others' resources to make money and at the same time relies on reCAPTCHA to frustrate other bots from accessing it own resources.

It may be easy to do today, but, going forward, how do we determine which bots are "good" and which ones are "bad"?

Clearly, simply being a "bot" does not imply "bad" intent. If it did then we should all be blocking search engine bots. Yet this is what reCAPTCHA does: it blocks not based on intent, but based on the characteristic of being a "bot".

wendsday

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Why does it matter to you why this question matters to me?

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