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0 pointsccalloway4y ago0 comments

Yes, but the number of sysadmins in the world is converging rapidly to zero. Mainly because the invisible overhead of having your boxes managed by people who use sed and awk is much higher than the alternatives (containerisation, cloud vendors, cattle not pets, infrastructure as code).

I think you actually confirmed my point when you said 'no sysadmin has time or interest'. I didn't say that no one uses shell anymore. I said that there was no practical justification for doing so. Lots of people still use it and don't have any interest in finding a better solution. These people are choosing, for their own reasons, to double down on an obsolete skillset. Good for them, I suppose, but I don't think that demand for their niche is going to be around for very long.

I also pointed out that sysadmins who know what they're doing use awk. Based on your mentioning awk it seems like you agree with this.

0 pointsccalloway4y ago0 comments

I also pointed out that sysadmins who know what they're doing use awk. Based on your mentioning awk it seems like you agree with this.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

ozim4y ago· 1 in thread

I care to disagree because you just move one abstraction layer higher and again you will use sed and awk.

To move stuff to that cattle and to maintain cloud environments, to prepare k8s clusters and manage those. To create docker images or to maintain servers that are running k8s.

You still have AWS console and Azure CLI or GCP console and configurations that need to be search/replaced. You still need to parse logs to understand what is happening in multiple environments, which I would say makes it even more important to be good with unix-fu because you have to find that one broken cow to put it out of misery.

Those command line tools are still useful and used.

ccallowayOP4y ago

Did you read or understand my original comment?

I specifically named awk as a way of solving these type of problems that has a similar applicability and maturity to a scripting language. My real objection is to long chains of cut, head, cat, grep, and so on. I also think that utilities like jq and xargs, which were invented exactly to allow people to do things in shell one-liners which are trivial in a proper language, are worse than useless.

I didn't say that no one should use awk, or no one should use the command line.

In fact I didn't say that no one should use pipes with head, cut and grep either. I just said that most reasons to use them were no longer valid.

turtlebits4y ago

You don't need to be a sysadmin to take advantage of CLI tools. Anyone that needs to manage files and/or the contents of them can benefit.

DarylZero4y ago

>containerisation, cloud vendors, cattle not pets, infrastructure as code

Lots of shell script in that part of the code world.

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