[X-Unix] rsync & ssh

[Stroller]

On Jul 7, 2004, at 12:07 pm, David Ledger wrote:

>> From: Stroller <MacMonster at myrealbox.com>
>>
>> Unfortunately, learning Unix is just plain hard. Any Unix "gurus" you
>> meet will probably have suffered a great deal of frustration &
>> exasperation in the acquisition of their knowledge, and they surely
>> spent lots of time doing things the long &/or hard way in the process.
>
> I'll agree with you there.  The first 3 years were particularly heavy .
>
>> Unix is *horribly* obscure & complex, and for no good reason other 
>> than
>> compatibility with legacy systems.
>
> Not sure what you mean here.  I can't think of any legacy systems it's 
> particularly compatible with.

Well, what I mean is basically that Unix stays horribly obscure & 
complicated in in order to remain compatible with Unix.

`ls -l foo` means "show full details of the file foo"
`ls -l -R` means "show full details of all the files in the directory & 
all directories below it"

`grep foo bar` means "look for foo in the file bar"
`grep -R bar` means "look (recursively?) for bar on standard input"

So to show full details of the file "-R" we use `ls -l -- -R`
But to look for the expression "-R" in the file bar we use `grep -e -R 
bar`

`tar` requires the -f flag to indicate that the following argument is 
the name of a file on which to operate, whereas the file to operate on 
is always the last argument to the `gzip` command. Unix would be less 
horribly complicated, quicker to learn for beginners & handier for 
experienced users alike, if flags were standardised and some of these 
anomalies revised, however some overnight "standardisation" would break 
every shell-script on the planet.

Stroller.