fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find' | Hacker News Reader

fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'

github.com

8 pointsvoxadam8 comments

This and other newcomers (e.g. exa, ripgrep, ..) are not specified by POSIX and thus not ubiquitous. For someone that interacts with multiple UNIX systems daily, I find that the tedium of maintaining -sometimes multiple versions- and moving these binaries around is greater than the benefits they provide.

The same can be said for new shells that have popped up in the last 5-10 years versus bash. They're not sufficient to escape the local minima of 'good enough'.

Wat. ripgrep and fd should be available via your system package manager. You shouldn't need to be "moving these binaries around."

I wonder what things you use that aren't specified by POSIX.

Until it's in the base os images, there's an institutional cost for large companies installing everyone's favorite 'enhanced' utility and so they opt to just not do so.

I've spent many years of my career crafting tooling to sync dot files and binaries around and largely over time just gave up on it as the juice is just not worth the squeeze.

What does that have to do with "copying binaries around"? If it isn't in the base OS image, then install yourself. Or not. And this has nothing to do with POSIX either. Because there is plenty in base OS images that aren't specified by POSIX.

I interact with multiple Unix systems daily too. Some of those systems have ripgrep and some don't. Unless I'm in a particular scenario where I think ripgrep would be useful, I just use grep instead. I don't really see the issue. For a short-lived machine, yeah, I don't bother with syncing dotfiles and all that other nonsense. I just use the bare OS environment and install stuff as needed. But I also have plenty of longer lived Unix machines (like the laptop I'm typing on) where it makes sense to set up a cozy dev environment optimized for my own patterns.

Ooh, I can't just install packages on machines. Change management is a super important thing and bypassing that to get a utility installed via a package manager would be a dumb way to get fired.

Sure, I get it. You don't work in a company that has this sort of culture, but a large number of us do. And you want us to. Do you want AWS engineers being able to just install whatever they want on the hosts running your VMs? Of course not.

Very little indeed of what you'll find in your average GNU/Linux userland is specified by POSIX.

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