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by dagw
1331 days ago
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unix commandline tools Even they get rewritten and updated and 'bloated' all the time. Compare the original BSD or AT&T tools to the latest GNU tools and you will see that they have been reworked, tweaked and updated countless times with many many new features added. In fact when the GNU tools started to become popular they where regularly accused of unnecessary bloat and being against the spirit and philosophy of Unix. |
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"All the time" is a stretch. The basic UNIX commands date back to the 70s and while they have grown more and more options over time, change is slow (which is a wonderful thing, to be clear). Yes, there was grumbling when GNU started adding even more options but even that is now decades ago.
As a consumer of the tools (whether by hand or by shell script), they provide a stable base to build on. I have some shell scripts from ca.1990 which still work fine. It's very pleasing to be able to build on top of a solid foundation that just keep working for a long time.