moreutils VS oil

I use mutlios and even I'm not that attached to it. The majority of my use is combined with process substitution, and could be replaced with common-ish tools like pee¹ or pipexec for more complex cases. The only occasion when I'm thankful for it is if I want to use a shell function as a target, but there are workarounds for that too.

As a noclobber user the footgun is largely hidden to me, but I feel its presence. multios without globbing support would be less useful, but would still work for most of my use cases. Scanning my shell history I see various cases of relying on zsh's ability to apply sorting and filtering to globs with multios' input redirection, but only a couple where I want that in output redirection.

Even with multios unset the behaviour is different between zsh and bash. For example, multios disables all the expansion, so zsh behaves like more like dash with ': >t{1,2}' by creating a file instead producing an error like bash does.

[FWIW, I google'd multiios to link the option in original comment. It really feels to me like it needs double-i, and I read the single i name the same way you do.]

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I'd be one of those people whose desire for dgsh-like functionality wanes. If it was slight DSL that I could "upgrade" pipelines to I'd probably use it, but not enough to warrant working on it or switching other tooling to support it.

The end of result of this morning's pipeline was breaking my jobs up, and applying some judicious use of nq² to keep track of it. I'd follow your advice and move on to more specialist tools if the job grew significantly or if it became a regular occurrence.

¹ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

² https://git.vuxu.org/nq/about/

For filesystem operations like batch renames at least, I am usually happy with `vidir` (part of `moreutils`: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/).

`vidir [path]` will open an editor with the given directory as buffer contents.

See also: "vipe" from the excellent "moreutils" package: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

There are some other gems in this package. The ones I find myself using regularly are 'ts' and 'sponge' but I'm sure the useful subset depends a lot on the kind of work you are doing

Joey Hess' excellent moreutils¹ comes with vipe which is a generalised solution for these types of tasks. It allows you to run whatever $EDITOR you've configured mid-pipe, making it possible to work your changes up in an interactive editor session. Useful for those of us not smart enough to write up our changes as a series of -c arguments ;)

(It fixes the vim issue by virtue of using a temporary file to do the magic)

¹ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Sounds like `vidir` from moreutils.

vidir and a few others from moreutils

Use pee (yes, I know) from moreutils. Something like:

I would use vidir from moreutils. Then you can do any edits and play around with any regexes you want!

For bulk file renaming, I recommend vidir from moreutils - it lets you rename everything in a directory with your $EDITOR (vim being the default).

Some related references (on a somewhat messy wiki page) - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compact-AST-Representat...

Feel free to add others

will prevent almost all of the "silent footguns".

YSH has strict:all and then a bunch of NEW features.

There's been good feedback recently, which has led to many concrete changes. So your experience can definitely influence the language! https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-To-Send-Feedback

Regarding writing tools/tests/benchmarks in bash+Python, vs. writing tools in your main language:

I think we might eventually concede that something Debian-like is the “standard development environment” (at least for server side stuff, i.e. not iOS apps)

In this case, bash+Python is a non-issue. It works extremely reliably. That’s actually why I use it! Everything else seems to break, or it’s really slow (node.js is a very common alternative).

- Microsoft conceded this back in ~2017, by building Linux into their kernel with WSL, and providing Ubuntu on top

Yes bash + Python is a disaster on Windows (I have scars from it), but Microsoft agrees that the right place to solve that is in Windows :-)

- Every CI system runs Debian/Ubuntu

- Every hosting provider runs Debian/Ubuntu

- Every online dev env like gitpod.io provides Debian/Ubuntu

This is somewhat related to remote dev envs: https://lobste.rs/s/ucirlx/lapdev_self_hosted_remote_dev

One vision for https://www.oilshell.org/ is that the CI environment is the dev environment is the hosting environment.

Everything is just an equal node in a distributed system. BUT it’s more git like, in that you explicitly sync and work “locally”, wherever that is. You don’t have the network chatter and flakiness of “the cloud”.

Oils has a very large set of monotonically increasing properties too - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/quality.html

All that is bash+Python that is run on every commit, and it’s extremely good at catching bugs and perf regressions.

I’m skeptical that any project has that level of quality automation written in pure Rust or Zig. More likely it’s a bunch of cloud services with YAML.

Also a bunch of “hard-coded” toolchains that you can’t script with bespoke code. Like some shell commands in your package.json, which is just a worse way of writing a shell script.

Our quality process is all self-hosted, in the repo, and runs on both Github Actions and sourcehut - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/pub/metrics.wwz/line...

bash and Python runs perfectly on Github Actions and sourcehut, with zero change. Containers also do.

(Although we need to unify the CI and release, because the release runs on 2 different real hardware machines, while CI is cloud only.)

Also, a main point Oils is that bash now has another highly compatible, spec-driven implementation – OSH. Having 2 independent implementations is something newer languages don’t have.

(copy of lobste.rs comment)

in your bashrc to enable it. I've used it for probably ~18 years now.

It also works with https://www.oilshell.org/ since we use GNU readline. Just 'set -o vi' in ~/.config/oils/oshrc

No other shell does that.

But I didn't know it was called MULTIOS until now. (I guess that's read "mult I/O's"? I have a hard time not reading it was multi-OS :) )

It seems a bit niche to be honest, but it's possible to support in Oils.

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Oils also uses Unix domain sockets already for the headless shell protocol

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Headless-Mode

We could do something like dgsh, but so far I haven't seen a lot of uptake / demand. Every time it's mentioned, somebody kinda wants it, and then it kinda peters out again ... still possible though.

I think flat files work fine for a lot of use cases, and once you add streaming, you also want monitoring, more control over backpressure/queue sizes, etc.

which works well. You don't have to clean when rebuilding variants. IMO this is 100% essential for writing C++ these days. You need a bunch of test binaries, and all tests should be run with ASAN and UBSAN.

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I wrote a mini-bazel on top of Ninja with these features:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/10/garbage-collector.html...

So it's ~1700 lines, but for that you get the build macros like asdl_library() generating C++ and Python (the same as proto_library(), a schema language that generates code)

And it also correctly finds dependencies of code generators. So if you change a .py file that is imported by another .py file that is used to generated a C++ header, everything will work. That was one of the trickier bits, with Ninja implicit dependencies.

I also use the Bazel-target syntax like //core/process

This build file example mixes low level Ninja n.rule() and n.build() with high level r.cc_library() and so forth. I find this layering really does make it scale better for bigger projects

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/asdl/NINJA_subgr...

Some more description - https://lobste.rs/s/qnb7xt/ninja_is_enough_build_system#c_tu...

This is sort of a category error...

re2c is a lexer generator, and YAML and Python are recursive/nested formats.

You can definitely use re2c to lex them, but it's not the whole solution.

I use it for everything possible in https://www.oilshell.org, and it's amazing. It really reduces the amount of fiddly C code you need to parse languages, and it drops in anywhere.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS - https://www.oilshell.org/ - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/

I'm looking for people to help fill out the "standard library" for Oils/YSH. We're implementing a shell for Python and JavaScript programmers who avoid shell!

On the surface, this is writing some very simple functions in typed Python. But I've realized that the hardest parts are specifying, TESTING, and documenting what the functions do.

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The most recent release announcement also asks for help - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/01/release-0.19.0.html (long)

If you find all those details interesting (if maybe overwhelming), you might have a mind for language design, and could be a good person to help.

Surveying what Python and JavaScript do is very helpful, e.g. for the recent Str.replace() function, which is nontrivial (takes a regex or string, replacement template or string)

But there are also very simple methods to get started, like Dict.values() and List.indexOf(). Other people have already contributed code. Examples:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/58d847008427dba2e60fe...

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/commit/8f38ee36d01162593e935...

This can also be useful to tell if you'll have fun working on the project - https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Where-Contributors-Have...

More on #help-wanted on Zulip (requires login) - https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/417617-help-wa...

Please send a message on Github or Zulip! Or e-mail me andy at oilshell dot org.

This is true, but then the corrolary is that new PRs need to come with this higher and rigorous level of test coverage.

And then that becomes a bit of a barrier to contribution -- that's a harness

I often write entirely new test harnesses for features, e.g. for https://www.oilshell.org, many of them linked here . All of these run in the CI - https://www.oilshell.org/release/latest/quality.html

The good thing is that it definitely helps me accept PRs faster. Current contributors are good at this kind of exhaustive testing, but many PRs aren't