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by simonw 931 days ago
What's better: spending a day figuring out a single line of a complex Bash script, or spending that same day learning literally 100x more because you didn't have to waste that much effort on each individual thing?

For me, the alternative to using ChatGPT to figure some weird piece of Bash trivial out isn't doing the work myself, meticulously and at great length. It's losing interest and not figuring that thing out at all.
2 comments
eternityforest 931 days ago
Losing interest and not figuring it out at all has been my approach to nontrivial bash. I'm not a UNIX philosophy fan in general, but trying to bea programming language and also a UI, all in one, is a bit much. It's ok-ish as a UI for cases where GUI doesn't work or you want a machine to be able to use the UI, but as a language it's missing a lot of stuff.
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Rediscover 931 days ago
Other option: asking the grey beard down the hall how to do it. Fifteen minutes, and all parties are happy.
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