@FaheemMitha Yes. After Halloween, most people throw out their jack-o-lanterns, or compost them. Instead, we elected one... But at least he's already suffered his first defeat in the courts.
@derobert Yes, I was meaning to ask how you folks have enjoyed the first week. Is you-know-who a topic of conversation in your social circle, or is everyone trying to pretend it isn't happening?
I recently got interested in CSV questions. There are a lot of them that asks to remove a certain column containing commas. I have flagged a couple of duplicates, but I keep finding more... I might give up on the archaeology for now and keep an eye out for future CSV questions instead...
@Kusalananda Those seem to me to beg (for the most part) for non-Unix handling.
E.g R dataframes and Python pandas.
@derobert Did you expect things to go south so quickly? I certainly didn't. I was completely caught by surprise. And my belated New Year resolution is to keep a closer eye on the news. One of these days World War 3 might start, and I wouldn't want to be left out.
@FaheemMitha Possibly. Some of them are tagged with awk and sed though, so a command-line solution is definitely asked for. cvskit and mlr seems to be good Unix tools for that sort of problem.
@FaheemMitha yes, that's one of the things I like here, you get to discover new stuff instead of getting an explanation of how to do things with whatever inappropriate tool you pre-selected
of course if an OP explains that external constraints limit the available tools, then...
@FaheemMitha If a person asks for a solution using a specific tool, and that tool is not suitable for performing the task, then it is the Right Thing To Do to point this out (and why, and what to use instead).
If I was a carpenter, and a customer asked me to make a chair using a pencil as the tool, I would explain why this wasn't such a good idea and tell them that as a professional carpenter, I know what tools to use to create the chair.
It's not as clear-cut as that. Some people think Unix Tools are fine for text manipulation. That tends to be the sorts of people who are comfortable with regexes, for example.
I might know a thing or to about carpentering, but I would never dream of asking someone who earns his money from that trade to use tools that I dictated.
@FaheemMitha Not really surprised. Honestly, I expected him to have PPACA (Obamacare) repealed by now...
@Kusalananda Well, sometimes it might be acceptable. If you need to fix your chair and you're on the ISS, well, you'll have to make do with the tools you have. Or more relevantly for us, sometimes you need to make something work on an initramfs, or embedded, or some other minimal system—and then too you need to make do with the tools you have.
So yeah, sometimes there is a real reason why the OP needs to do something in shell, and almost nothing else—but mostly there isn't, and OP probably just wasn't aware that there is a tool that makes the job so much easier.
I'd hope most people who are running in a tool-limited environment would mention that in their question.
R, for example, seems underused here. I'm not a R fan at all, but it's undeniably the easiest way to get a lot of text manipulation done, expecially of the rows/columns variety.
@Kusalananda There's this thing called the Internet.
I don't really have a TV either. There's one here, but I don't use it.
grumble remember to look what aptitude is removing as no longer required before hitting go grumble (just accidentally removed ifupdown and iproute2 from a couple of systems, and rebooted one of them...thankfully none w/o out-of-band access) [especially on testing]
I'm a bit mystified by this guy. He says he's running the command I've given him, but he keeps getting errors. What could be the problem? unix.stackexchange.com/a/341231/116858
Similar thing happened in another question from the same guy. That one was also a CSV question and he had the exact same problem.
@Kusalananda old version of the tool? Or maybe he put some whitespace after the backslash on the first line, or he joined the two lines but kept the backslash?
@Gilles He says he made sure he had the current version, and he had the same issue in another question where I helped him (comments now removed there), where the command didn't span rows.
