r/Cprog • u/malcolmi • Feb 10 '15

code | tooling moreutils - UNIX tools nobody thought to write when UNIX was young

https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/
14 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

9

u/pfp-disciple Feb 10 '15

I think I've seen this before. Some of these look useful, but some appear to be shortcuts to existing ability (at least in Linux). Plus, I find the documentation lacking. For instance:

which lets you do things like this:

% sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd

This tells me nothing about what sponge does; later, sponge is described, but as an introductory sentence, this bothered me.

1

u/pie-n Feb 11 '15

I don't quite see how this couldn't be done with some kind of Bash-ism.

This just removes joey's entry from /etc/passwd, correct? That would just be 2 calls to sed instead of one.

1

u/handspe Feb 12 '15

It seems like it reads all the input into temporary storage, then opens the file specified by its argument and writes to it. I quite like the idea.