Hello Chat, I've posted what one might call an attempt to a canonical question https://unix.stackexchange.com/q/450835/53092 Your edit and remarks are very welcome
@Jesse_b Nothing special. One working day of this week left (midsummer's eve on Friday is a public holiday), then another week until a bit of vacation.
The downside is obviously that there's a few things that needs to be finished before I go on holiday...
So the first time I ordered it and it was defective, I returned it. Shortly afterwards, I saw exactly 1 unit available for sale from the same manufacturer.
I made the obvious guess, and called up Amazon to ask if they were trying to sell the unit I returned. The rep assured me that wasn't the case. So I ordered that "new" unit, and it had exactly the defect.
Some additional weirdness - I've been trying to return it for some days (since Sunday), but nobody has come to pick it up. Yet additional weirdness. I've now been notified that I've been credited for the return, even though the product has not actually been returned.
I swear, I'm not making this up.
@Jesse_b You're really good at making people feel better.
@Jesse_b It's kind of horrible, actually. Despite what Hollywood films would have you believe, criminals aren't glamourous. They're frightening and disgusting people.
@Jesse_b White collar crime. It's endemic in India. Recently there was that business with the security guards. I can't remember if I mentioned that here. That's certainly directly affecting me.
@Jesse_b Ok. Well, we have security guards at the entrance to our compound. That contains the building we live in. And recently there was a secret type conspiracy thing to replace those guards with other guards from dodgy security agency we know nothing about.
There's quite a lot more to it, but that's the gist.
I'm unclear how serious this is, but it certainly isn't good.
If I told the engineers at work they should include GNU tools in the OS they would probably make me write "I will not say stupid things" 1000 times on a chalk board
What I meant was that most people asking things on U&L certainly have embraced the GNU coreutils and other GNU tools. And they expect things to work like that everywhere. But they don't, and that's good, because GNU tools have real issues with command line flags and strange reordering of command lines options.
@Kusalananda meh. I don't know if I agree. If I write up an answer with one pipe more than necessary I get lampooned about it not being efficient, yet you want people invoking extra utilities to sanitize input data?
The GNU tools have been around a long time. They aren't perfect, but they are apparently a lot better than the status quo that was around at the time when they arrived.
Again, my point was that GNU was sort of a Unix standard. I wasn't suggesting that BSD people would alter their utilities to confirm with GNU. Just that BSD people probably use GNU too.
For one thing, the GNU tools generally have more features.
And back in the 80s and 90s people were quite happy to have them. I suppose these days there are other options. Like Clang.
@FaheemMitha I don't think "more features" means "better", it just means you can use a fewer number of tools to do more things. Which in turn means users don't have to care too much about what works on non-GNU systems, which means they start writing scripts that are non-portable. And then they end up here and start answering questions with "just install GNU coreutils and everything will be fine".
The other day, someone commented on an OpenBSD question with "just install Linux".
@Jesse_b Just precisely because coreutils is not standardized, it has to be treated as a moving target, just like bash. This works in this version, but not in that version.
It's a mess.
It's also why I like C and other real standard languages. Try doing something in Python, and you'll mess up if it's plus or minus 0.5 versions off.
So you can write a program with head/grep that will work on like 90% of the machines out there but someone will complain because it wont work on some stubborn unix system
@FaheemMitha Also GNU things. Thay are POSIX utilities. But nobody knows about them because they do everything with grep and get their results colorized.
@Kusalananda Because gcc now has an large user base of people using it. And there's always resistance to switching away from something you know.
I'm talking about back in the 80s, when gcc was first created. It was a big success quite quickly. In fact Cygnus was created to exploit the niche that it created.
At least, that's my understanding.
I don't know if younger people have heard of Cygnus. It was swallowed up by Red Hat.
Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: Making free software affordable.
For years, employees of Cygnus Solutions were the maintainers of several key GNU software products, including the GNU Debugger and GNU Binutils (which included the GNU Assembler and Linker). It was also a major contributor to the GCC project and drove the change in the project's management from having a single gatekeeper to having an independent committee. Cygnus developed BFD...
@FaheemMitha Here's some of the reasoning for why OpenBSD switched from gcc to clang, and it doesn't all have to do with licensing: openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/… (written well before the actual switch)