There I said it !

  • LemoineFairclough@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I think that providing an exit status that is not 0 when zcat is used with an uncompressed file is useful. Though my opinion is less strong regarding whether it should write more text after an error occurred, it’s probably more useful for a process to terminate quickly when an error occurred rather than risk a second error occurring and making troubleshooting harder.

    I think that trying to change any existing documented features of widely used utilities will lead to us having less useful software in the future (our time is probably better spent making new programs and new documentation): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      Not improving existing software leads to stagnation.

      It’s certainly a good part of why so much of linux is an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess to use.

      Whatever the first implementation does ends up being a suicide pact by default.

      Another option is to change cat to auto decompress compressed files, instead of printing gibberish.

  • allywilson@lemmy.ml
    0·
    10 months ago

    Yeah, it’s a pain. Leads to bad one liners:

    for i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; done

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      Thanks !

      But still we shouldn’t have to resort to this !

      Also, can’t get the output through pipe

      for i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; done | grep mysearchterm

      this appears to work

      find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'zcat "{}" 2>/dev/null || cat "{}"' | grep "mysearchterm"

      Still, that was a speed bump that I guess everyone dealing with mass compressed log files has to figure out on the fly because zcat can’t read uncompressed files ! argg !!!

      for i in $(ls); do zcat $i 2>/dev/null || cat $i; done | grep mysearchterm