I've been trying nushell and words fail me. It's like it was made for actual humans to use! 🤯 🤯 🤯
It even repeats the column headers at the end of the table if the output takes more than your screen...
Trying to think of how to do the same thing with awk/grep/sort/whatever is giving me a headache. Actually just thinking about awk is giving me a headache. I think I might be allergic.
I'm really curious, what's your favorite shell? Have you tried other shells than your distro's default one? Are you an awk wizard or do you run away very fast whenever it's mentioned?
Why not parse
ls(and what to do instead)?The usual problems with parsing
lsdon't happen here because Nu'slsbuiltin returns properly typed data. You can work with it in pretty much the same way you would work with it in Python, except that Nu has a composition operator that doesn't suck ass (|), so you don't have to write as much imperative boilerplate.I have a number of reservations regarding Nu (the stability of the scripting language, unintuitive syntax rules, a disappointing standard library) but this particular argument just doesn't apply.
Isn't that the point that the previous commenter was making by linking that answer? I read their comment as "here is why you should use Nu shell instead of parsing
lsoutput."I feel my sanity slowly slipping away while reading...
Yeah, why are linebreaks & co. in names even allowed on file system level? There's not even something like a restricted mode mount option for most fs.
because why not? it's just characters and any UTF8 string is allowed as a filename so long as it doesn't contain a null byte. people's usecases are different, and you really shouldn't be parsing
lsoutput in the first placeThere's an argument to be made that system software like filesystems and kernels shouldn't get too smart about validating or transforming strings, because once you start caring about a strings meaning, you can no longer treat it as just a byte sequence and instead need to worry about all the complexities of Unicode code points. "Is this character printable" seems like a simple question but it really isn't.
Now if I were to develop a filesystem from scratch, would I go for the 80% solution of just banning the ASCII newline specifically? Honestly yes, I don't see a downside. But regardless of how much effort is put into it, there will always be edge cases – either filenames that break stuff, or filenames that aren't allowed even though they should be.
Oh right, filesystem is initialized before charset & stuff. My bad.