Shell Scripts v. Command Options (was: Re: small bug in who(1) of SVR3)

[Jay Maynard]

In article <1396:Jan1811:54:2091 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>In article <1991Jan16.175908.3338 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> I don't advocate callous disregard for efficiency -- that way lies GNU
>> Emacs and other excesses -- but a sense of perspective is needed.  Hacking
>> C code to avoid writing a one-line shell script is a gross waste of time
>> and money unless that program is truly critical to system performance.

(Henry, that first sentence would normally be .sigfile material. Bravo!)

>That depends on your user community. In general, code that will be
>distributed to thousands of sites should be written efficiently.

For heaven's sake, why? Like Henry, I feel that efficiency is important - and
C news says all that needs saying about Henry's idea of efficient (thanks!) -
but consider the poor slob who's distributed those thousands of copies, and
then has to maintain it. Why should he increase his support burden and
maintenance headaches just to save a tenth of a second on a function that's
executed twice a day? There's a tradeoff there, and the most effort towards
efficiency is best concentrated on those parts of the system where it makes a
significant difference.
-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jmaynard at thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu  | adequately be explained by stupidity.
"Today is different from yesterday." -- State Department spokesman Margaret
Tutwiler, 17 Jan 91, explaining why they won't negotiate with Saddam Hussein