tac VS murex

cat just regurgitates the contents of the file, but the resulting piped fd is non-seekable. Since almost every command that can operate on a file from stdin can also operate on the file by name/path, at best this is just a needless invocation of a process (i.e. `tv foo.csv` should have been used instead of `cat foo.csv | tv`) - if the app in question can't handle paths, then you can have the shell pipe the file into it instead (e.g. `tv < foo.csv`). At worst, the recipient program would need to buffer the entire contents of the input if it needs to perform non-sequential operations on the source data - this is the case with things like `tac` that need to seek to the end of the input (see https://github.com/neosmart/tac for how `cat foo | tac` requires buffering but both `tac foo` and even `tac < foo` don't).

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.