On Fri, 16 Mar 2018, J C Nash wrote:
This may introduce a tangent, but I find the limit is often not the
coded one but issues related to
- getting 250 characters into the line and not remembering whether the
parameter should be X or x and what the difference is.
Indeed.
For those who may not be familiar, "<Esc>#" is a useful key combo in bash
for this situation. I was delighted to discover it.
It immediately puts a "#" comment character at the start of your line then
submits it as if you had pressed enter. The incomplete command is then in
your command line buffer as a comment. You can look up the missing info
you need, then retrieve your command line using the Up arrow key or ^R,
then carry on completing and submitting it after deleting the "#".
Kind of like a ^Z suspend for the command line.
Shell (bash) processing, including application argument parsing and
completion, and easy handling of filenames with spaces in by starting them
with a quote has *really* advanced over the decades. In my opinion command
line has made more useful progress than graphical interfaces in the past
20 years.
I was really blown away when I accidently discovered that scp does command
line (e.g. filesystem path) completion on the *remote* host! e.g. hit
<tab> as you enter a filesystem path and it can show options or complete
it, just as if it was your local host. You need to have key-based, not
password, authentication on the remote system for this to work, obviously.
As for xargs (almost always with -0) I use it all the time. It allows me
to pipe multiple commands together is a consistent manner that always
works, so less thinking. :-)
Brett