Unix Tools

The shell has interacts with a set of Unix tools in /bin and so forth. However, in many cases, those tools have grown functionality that overlaps with shell.

Unix Tools ...

That Start Processes (in parallel)

• make and other build tools. make -j for parallel builds.
• xargs, -P for parallel execution, -I {} for substitution
  • Also GNU Parallel, which is mentioned in the bash manual
• find -exec and -exec +

That Have Expression Languages

Expression languages must be fully recursive to count here.

With no lexer:

• find -- -a -o ! ( )
• test -- -a -o ! ( )
• expr -- arithmetic, subsumed by $(())

Languages with lexers:

• awk
• dtrace -- modelled after awk.

Honorable mention:

• strace also has a little expression language, but it's not fully recursive

That Use Regexes

• grep, grep -E
• sed, sed --regexp-extended in GNU sed
• awk (extended only)
• expr
• find -regex
• bash itself

That Receive Code Snippets (Remote Evaluation)

• tar has a --sed option

That Have Printf-Style Formatting

See Appendix A: How to Quickly and Correctly* Generate a Git Log in HTML

• find -printf (arbitrary filenames)

• stat -c (arbitrary filenames)

• curl --write-out %{response_code} -- URLs can't have arbitrary characters?

• printf itself (coreutils)

• time (/usr/bin/time) -- mostly numbers

• date -- mostly numbers

• bash

  • the printf builtin
  • the time builtin and the TIMEFORMAT string -- mostly numbers
  • the prompt string: \h \W

• ps --format

• git log --pretty=format: (arbitrary descriptions)

• hg log --template -- http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/customizing-the-output-of-mercurial.html (doesn't have \0 as far as I can tell.) Mercurial has its own template language.

NOTE: grep should have a syntax for captures, like $1 $2 name: $name age: $age. sed just has & for the matched group.

With Tabular Output

• find / ls
• ps
• df (has -h and -H human-readable option, but no format string)

Misc Expression Languages

• getopts builtin spec, and /usr/bin/getopt
  • leading : means to do different error handling! Instead of the arg. Gah.

The Worst Offender

find starts processes (in parallel), it a recursive boolean expression language, it has regexes (and globs), and it has field substitution. It should be part of the shell!

Families of Unix Tools

• CSV, JSON, HTML, XML, recfile, 1991 paper!
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/oilshell/comments/719p6c/how_to_quickly_and_correctly_generate_a_git_log/dndp9uq/