On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> Yes, reusing common code and knowledge is a good thing. But spending >> a bit of time learning shell syntax will help you with pretty much >> everything else you'll ever do on a unix-like system, where spending >> that time learning a new way to make your program start at boot will >> just get you back to what you already could do on previous systems. > > Les, I could re-use your logic to argue that one should never even try > to learn bash, and stick to C instead. You could, if every command typed by every user since unix v7 had been parsed with C syntax instead of shell so there would be something they could 'stick to'. But, that's not true. > Every *real* user of UNIX-like > systems should be capable of writing C code, which is used in so many > more circumstances than bash. That might be true, but it is irrelevant. > Why would you ever want to start your system using some clunky > shell-based interpreter like bash, (which cannot even share memory > between processes in a native way), when you can simply write a short > piece of C code, fork() all your services, compile it, and run? If you think bash is 'clunky', then why even run an operating system where it is used as the native user interface? Or, if you need to change something, why not fix bash to have the close mapping to system calls that bourne shell had back in the days before sockets? > And if you really insist on writing commands interactively into a > command prompt, you are welcome to use tcsh, and reuse all the syntax > and well-earned knowledge of C, rather than invest time to learn > yet-another-obscure-scripting-language... > > Right? Or not? Well, Bill Joy thought so. I wouldn't argue with him about it for his own use, but for everyone else it is just another incompatible waste of human time. > If not, you may want to reconsider your argument against systemd --- > it's simple, clean, declarative, does one thing and does it well, and > it doesn't pretend to be a panacea of system administration like bash > does. I'm sure it can work - and will. But I'm equally sure that in my lifetime the cheap computer time it might save for me in infrequent server reboots will never be a win over the expensive human time for the staff training and new documentation that will be needed to deal with it and the differences in the different systems that will be running concurrently for a long time. The one place it 'seems' like it should be useful would be on a laptop if it handles sleep mode gracefully, but on the laptop where I've been testing RHEL7 beta it seems purely random whether it will wake from sleep and continue or if it will have logged me out. And I don't have a clue how to debug it. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com