RE: qshell, ls, sort by size

Hi Rob

I'm guessing it probably means first 5 characters/digits. I can't be bothered reading the man page for whatever particular random variant of unix this happened to be. That's what you get in an "easier" command line interface.

<SARCASM>
Clunky old OS/400 with its pathetic verbose text interface would force you to type something obvious like ORDERBY(*SIZE) as the parameter determining sort key. Anyone can see the OS/400 approach is clearly inferior - we all prefer cryptic terse statements to longer self-documenting statements...
</SARCASM>

There's some things I could buy into that make unix a nice operating system, but the command interface with its switches, terse and verbose modes, varying arbitrary options and randomly named and inconsistent commands is not one of them. By comparison the OS/400 command syntax and organization is simply light years ahead. The fact that it is logical and you can guess commands and even parameters is proof (to me at least) that the OS/400 command interface was much better designed than unix.

It surprises me that Hans would make such a statement. It's hard to imagine anyone defending a program written in such an obscure and idiomatic way - why should it be OK for an operating system ? Saying it is concise simply makes excuses for its lack of consistency and obfuscation of meaning and intent.

I do understand why someone would prefer the scripting capabilities and environment, but the OS commands themselves ?

Regards
Evan Harris


-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rob@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, 27 May 2009 1:05 a.m.
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: qshell, ls, sort by size

Why the extra ,5 in -k5,5?

Rob Berendt