On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:26:07PM +0200, Mathieu Lonjaret wrote: > No idea, probably none. > > that would not be the interesting point, if any. it's just that the > tool is already there and (should be) simpler to use than piping > various commands around, as they illustrate below.
> Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 05:18:56 -0700 > From: Akshat Kumar <aku...@mail.nanosouffle.net> > Subject: Re: [9fans] du and find > To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> > > >From the website: > > "ack is written purely in Perl, and takes advantage > of the power of Perl's regular expressions." > > Forgive my ignorance and irrelevance to this topic, > but what are the advantages of Perl's regular > expressions, over the implementation we have > currently in Plan 9? I had in fact the answer, a long time ago: because they simply do not know that ed(1) exists, and sed(1) etc. A group, providing an ISDN router based on Debian, was requiring a lot of memory and disk space. I asked why??? that much for _that_?!! The answer: we need perl(1) installed. But what for? Answer: to replace @@GATEWAY@@ and so on by customized values in a file... (They didn't even thought of building a distribution on a vulcan to simply install on the target.) They didn't know about ed(1). So I tell them regexp were ed(1); and ed(1) was required by POSIX.2. And tried to make the demonstration... to see that Debian didn't provide ed(1) by default. I ask Debian, why the f...?!!? Answer: GNU's Not Unix... And this day I realized I was not GNU. And switch to *BSD before asking myself some questions that lead me to Plan9... -- Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C