> GNU utilities, are not only unsexy, they are bloated and messy, and prone to failure; the GNU implementations (coreutils: grep, cat, tail, etc) of standard UNIX tools are not done with simplicity in mind.

I've heard people say how GNU code is bloated and messy many times before, but never that they're prone to failure. I've never had any failure myself with any GNU code. Can you give some examples of failures you've experienced?

Also, I'm looking at the coreutils source right now, and it's not as messy as I was expecting. true.c is only a pageful with 80 lines, many of which are simply because of the license comment and the usage() function for --help. cat.c and tail.c also seem reasonably understandable. Biggest complaint I can make is that there's cases where spaces and tabs are mixed in the indentation, but I've long resigned myself to expect that in projects that have more than 1 major contributor.

I do, however, think that glibc and gcc are pretty messy. I tried looking for the definition of fopen() in openbsd's libc and found it in less than 30 seconds by grepping. I still haven't found glibc's. gcc seems to rely heavily on its own extensions, because I don't understand what's going on here:

    int
    main (int argc, char **argv)
    {
      toplev toplev (NULL, /* external_timer */
                     true /* init_signals */);

      return toplev.main (argc, argv);
    }

That looks like a function prototype in a function definition, but it seems to mean an assignment going by the next line. Then in toplev.c, we have:

    int
    toplev::main (int argc, char **argv)
    {

That looks like C++, but the file extension is ".c"...

You know what? Nevermind. Comparing the code for true.c and cat.c between glibc and openbsd's libc, I do rather like how clear openbsd is in its code. Damn. Sexy is a good word. Now I understand why people speak so well of it. I don't even need grep, the source file hierarchy is so clear. Looking back at GNU's true.c, I don't even understand half of what's going on there in those 80 lines, and it turns out that true.c is also the source for false.c, it just #include "true.c".

TL;DR I agree that GNU utilities are messy. I'm not sure of the bloated aspect, because I do like that utilities have internationalized documentation built-in, but that seems to be bloat by openbsd's standards. And I wouldn't know of them being prone to failure, because I never had one with them.

EDIT: Huh. I wanted to reply to Hello71, but there's no reply link under his post. Anyone know why? Anyway, yeah, I saw a comment in the file mentioning that over a line that referred to stdout. Can't check now because I'm away from the computer. I didn't really understand the reason though.