util-linux VS coreutils

> Again I understand, most people don't seem to care about that, because they were born into cloud culture and have no clue what they are doing in terms of efficiency money/resource-wise.

They have no clue about how computers work, full stop. Sure, they know programming languages, but generally speaking, if you ask them about IOPS, disk or network latency, NUMA, cache lines, etc. they’ll tell you it doesn’t matter, and has been abstracted away for them. Or worse, they’ll say sub-optimal code is fine because shipping is all that matters.

There is certainly a difference between sub-optimal and grossly un-optimized code. Agonizing over a few msec outside of hot loops is probably not worthwhile from an efficiency standpoint, but if it's trivial to do correctly, why not do it correctly? One recent shocking example I found was `libuuid` in its various forms. util-linux's implementation [0] at its most recent tag is shockingly slow in larger loops. I'm fairly certain it's due to entropy exhaustion, but I haven't looked into it enough yet.

MacOS uses arc4random [1] (which for Linux, is in glibc as of v2.36, but you can get it from libbsd-dev otherwise), and it's much, much faster (again, on large loops).

I made some small C programs and a shell runner to demonstrate this [2].

[0]: https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/blob/stable/v2.40/l...

[1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/arc4random.3.html

[2]: https://gist.github.com/stephanGarland/f6b7a13585c0caf9eb64b...

There are su and runuser in util-linux (GPL-2.0) [1].

[1]: https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/tree/master/login-u...

>It remained in the "getty" process for some time, well into the {Free,Net,Open}BSD era.

Still there in agetty: https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/blob/master/term-ut... And, I imagine in other getty implementations.

Huh, I will try this later. Bit confused by the instructions on the Archwiki but I think I can figure it out. Thanks so much for the help. Btw, it seems you were right on what was wrong. Good eyes.

So, this script serves as a pretty good wall replacement (wall will strip all escape/control sequences other than \007, by the way).

The login program (used for terminal logins) is part of the util-linux project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Util-linux

if anbody actually at Canonical is reading this and wants me (and others) to take snaps seriously, please consider submitting pull requests to some of the core cli tool projects impacted by the way you guys abuse the loop device mechanism. Something simple like the ability to export HIDE_SNAP_MOUNTS=1 that gets picked up by the impacted tools in util-linux (lsblk, mount, blkid, fdisk, etc) and gnu coreutils (du, df) and simply hides the lines related to loop device mounts would go a long way - preferably only the ones added by snap but even an option to hide all of them would be better than nothing.

Pick a different filesystem, or wait for this feature to land in util-linux.

How about the history for "true": https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits/master/src/tr...

Yeah, the thing is that `yes` isn't a stand alone project, it is usually part of a bigger project such as coreutils (https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/).

For the comparison to be valid you would have to split up coreutils into roughly 100 individual repositories and replace many of the implementations with ones that are trivial, buggy, and/or unmaintained that pose a supply chain attack risk because it gets hard to keep track of what's maintained, by whom and how. Coreutils is close to 100kLOC and its programs aren't packaged individually. It is far, far from the random mess that are microlibraries in NPM.

less (17kLOC), awk (43kLOC) and grep (4kLOC) are separate projects, but some of those require a bit more insight than much application code these days, so it makes sense that they are individual projects.

>There is no such thing as a small legacy codebase

Very true. As a followup, I think it's worth pointing out that command line applications in particular can cram a lot of functionality into very few LOC.

Last night, I read through the source code for `cat` (yes, that `cat`) and it was only about 800 lines of fairly breezy C: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

And a tiny CLI tool I use every day, several times a day, for learning Finnish, is about 200 lines of Python: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

AFAIK, the remote applications simply do an isatty() check on the stdout and that's it; a proper terminal is then apparently expected to correctly skip and quietly ignore any OSC sequence it does not understand. See the source of ls [0], for example.

[0] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/2a72cf1e9959f40b...

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/fcfba90d0d27a1...

A summary of other changes just released in GNU coreutils 9.5 are:

* mv accepts --exchange to swap files

> some are simple like yes(1)

Not that simple: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

The -S / --split-string option[1] of /usr/bin/env is a relatively recent addition to GNU Coreutils. It's available starting from GNU Coreutils 8.30[2], released on 2018-07-01.

Beware of portability: it relies on a non-standard behavior from some operating systems. It only works for OS's that treat all the text after the first space as argument(s) to the shebanged executable; rather than just treating the whole string as an executable path (that can happen to contain spaces).

Fortunately this non-standard behavior is more the norm than the exception: it works at least on modern GNU/Linux, BSDs, and macOS.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/env-...

[2] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/b09dc6306e7affaf...