Useful, robust shell utilities

[Steven Majewski]

On 1 Mar 2002, Donn Cave wrote:

> Quoth Jonathan Gardner <jgardn at alumni.washington.edu>:
>
> | I think it would be nice to make things like 'grep' even...
> |
> | Here is my wish list. Each of these should implement a significant portion
> | of what the GNU utils do. They should be robust, and give reasonable
> | results, and reasonable exceptions.
> |
> | touch, chmod, chown, chgrp, touch
> | df, du
> | cp, dd, install, mv, rm, shred
>
> Some of them are essentially POSIX 1003.1 functions, hence supported in
> the posix module (which we usually call "os" so it will appear that these
> functions are supported on all platforms, whether they really are or not.)
>
> chmod == chmod()
> chown == chown()
> chgrp == chown()
> rm == unlink()
> mv == rename()
> dd ~= read(), write(), lseek()
> df == fstatvfs()
>

... And some like 'dd' have a zillion options mainly because they are
command line tools and aren't programmable on any finer scale. In python,
it would be easier to just write a little function that does exactly
what you want than it would be to remember all of the various option
switches.

-- Steve Majewski