* * * * *

               Unix is nothing but obscure commands rarely used

And speaking of Unix [1] …

I've been using some variation on Unix for almost twenty years now and I'm
still coming across new commands that apparently have been in Unix since the
Version 6 days (or so it seems). About a month ago I just heard mention of
the seq [2] command, which prints a sequence of numbers (seems pretty silly
but it can come in handy when manipulating say, photos from a digital camera
from the command line).

And yes, sure enough, it found the command on The Company's servers. But
they're running a relatively recent distribution of Linux, I thought. Surely
it's some new command.

“No it isn't,” said my over ten year old install of RedHat 5.2, “and stop
calling me Shirley.”

I suppose that's expected since I haven't bothered to read all the man pages
on any Unix system I've used. But then again, my over ten year old install of
RedHat 5.2 has 1,306 possible commmands to run. My even newer CentOS 4
install has 3,117 possible commands to run.

That's a lot of man pages to check.

Assuming every command has a man page to check. There's this gconfd-2 command
that's running, yet there isn't a man page for it, so it's off to Clusty [3]
…

This also extends to the various API (Application Programming Interface)s
installed on the system. I've been using Linux for easily over 10 years, and
just the other day discovered the ffs() [4] function (which, to tell the
truth, I haven't a need for). Big deal—there are a lot of libraries installed
that I don't use, but this isn't in some obscure library. It's in the Big
Kahuna of libraries—glibc—the one library that every single program is linked
against!

Blimey!

I'm beginning to suspect that program bloat [5] is less about sloppy code and
more about duplication of code due to ignorance of what already exists.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/07/09.1
[2] http://www.ss64.com/bash/seq.html
[3] http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=gconfd
[4] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/ffs.html
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/07/01.1

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