I have always considered myself an engineer because I’m part of a multidisciplinary engineering organization designing a physical product that has embedded software. And “engineer” is the word at the end of my degrees, I guess.
But if somebody called me by any of those terms in the OP I would answer. And if somebody who works on an app or a video game calls themselves an engineer, it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
My only conclusion is that we here, who spend our days specifying exactly what we want computers to do, are not so great specifying ourselves exactly.
Everyone who works on making software is a developer, even people who don’t program at all. people who make art for software work in software development. A “coder” only writes code. It’s more of a task than a job. A software engineer does technical design and probably also codes.
Yeah. It could just as well have issued a file not found error when you try to touch a nonexistent file. And we would be none the wiser about what we’re missing in the world.
“Do one thing and do it very well” is the UNIX philosophy after all; if you’re 99% likely to just create that missing file after you get a file not found error, why should touch waste your time?
I sometimes use cat to concatenate files. For example, add a header to a csv file without manually copy and paste it. It’s rare, but at least more frequent than using touch.
Yes, when you are for example checking if the permissions in the directory are correct, or if you want to check if your nfs export is working. It’s one of those commands that once you know it exists, you WILL find a way to use it.
It is short for concatenate, which is to join things together. You can give it multiple inputs and it will output each one directly following the previous. It so happens to also work with just one input.
When you updated a Django server, you were supposed to touch the settings.py file so the server would know to reload your code. (I haven’t used any for a long time, so I don’t know if it’s still the procedure.)
Ahhhhh, fuck. I’m quite noob with linux. I got into some rabbit hole trying to read the docs. I found 2 man pages, one is cat(1) and the other cat(1p). Apparently the 1p is for POSIX.
If someone could help me understand… As far as I could understand I would normally be concerned with (1), but what would I need to be doing to be affected by (1p)?
The POSIX standard is more portable. If you are writing scripts for your system, you can use the full features in the main man pages. If you are writing code that you want to run on other Linux systems, maybe with reduced feature sets like a tiny embedded computer or alternates to gnu tools like alpine linux, or even other unixes like the BSDs, you will have a better time if you limit yourself to POSIX-compatible features and options – any POSIX-compatible Unix-like implementation should be able to run POSIX-compliant code.
This is also why many shell scripts will call #!/bin/sh instead of #!/bin/bash – sh is more likely to be available on tinier systems than bash.
If you are just writing scripts and commands for your own purposes, or you know they will only be used on full-feature distributions, it’s often simpler and more comfortable to use all of the advanced features available on your system.
If you execute a binary without specifying the path to it, it will be searched from the $PATH environment variable, which is a list of places to look for the binary. From left to right, the first found one is returned.
You can use which cat to see what it resolves to and whereis cat to get all possible results.
If you intentionally wants to use a different binary with the same name, you can either directly use its path, or prepend its path to $PATH.
I mean, timestamps aren’t really all that useful. Really just if you do some stuff with makefiles but even then it’s a stretch. I did once use cat for it’s intended purpose tho, for a report. We split up the individual chapters into their own files so we have an easier time with git stuff, made a script that had an array with the files in the order we wanted, gave it to cat and piped that into pandoc
I used it recently to update the creation date of a bunch of notes. Just wanted them to display in the correct order in Obsidian. Besides that though, always just used it for file creation lol
Touch is super useful for commands that interact with a file but don’t create the file by default. For example, yesterday I needed to copy a file to a remote machine accessible over ssh so I used scp (often known as “secure copy”) but needed to touch the file in order to create it before scp would copy into it
Creating an empty file is one of its intended purposes. Unix commands were designed as multi-purpose primitives, so they could be reused and composed to handle many different tasks. The touch command is no exception.
Not really. I believe : is the “true” builtin. So it’s like running a program that exits with zero and writes nothing to stdout. The >> streams the empty stdout into the named file.
I’m betting that’s why none ever materialized. Most tools that can manipulate a file, can also create that file first, so there’s just never been a usecase.
Right-clicking the desktop to create a new txt file in Windows feels so natural, but I can’t really think of any time you’d want to create a new file and do nothing with it in a CLI.
One use case is if you’re running a web server that is configured to return a “maintenance” page instead of the live site if a particular file exists. Which is actually pretty cool because then you don’t have to update the config when you need to do something or let your users get a bunch of 502 errors, you just touch maintenance and you’re good.
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