The tip for the day will be, “How to save yourself at least one keystroke, several times a day.”
But first … a test. Which one of these is vdir
and which one is ls -l
?
total 80 |
total 80 |
It’s a trick question, I admit it. vdir
by default looks like, smells like, tastes like plain old long-form ls
. And unless you’ve got color settings or special aliases piping particular flags back into ls
, they’re obvious twins.
In fact, their flags are dead ringers. They both arrived in your system on board coreutils. Their man pages are so close as to be copied-and-pasted. The similarity is uncanny.
So what’s the point? Why bother bringing vdir
into the picture, if it’s just an ls
knockoff?
Beause “v-d-i-r” is exactly one character shorter than “l-s-space-dash-l”.
And given that a 70kg person burns a whopping 50 calories typing for a half an hour … and the commonly accepted words-per-minute calculation is standardized to five-letter words … and a 40 wpm typist covers 1200 words in 30 minutes, pounding out 6000 keystrokes in that amount of time. …
I do believe, if my calculations are correct, each keystroke burns 0.0083 calories. Aha! I just saved you 0.0083 calories, which you can spend walking to the refrigerator, if you like. 🌯
Oh wait, were you trying to lose weight … ?
This wins my award for the most pointless program I’ve ever seen, which is saying something considering I looked at the iOS app store today. Why not just alias ‘ls -l’ to ls, as I do, or, to follow vdir’s logic, something even shorter — perhaps just ‘l’?
Does arch package this or something? Debian doesn’t seem to.
It should be in coreutils in both. And yes, it is rather pointless, but I say that not knowing the history of either. It might be that one or the other is a holdover from earlier days of computing, or for compatibility purposes. 😉
clearly you’ve never typed “yes” into a command prompt…
Pingback: Links 19/6/2014: New Mir, Dalvik Changes, X.org Turns 30 | Techrights
“vidir” (vi to edit directory paths as text files) instead of “vdir” is a more interesting tool
I think I saw that when I looked at moreutils. It is very clever. I do almost exactly the same thing with renameutils’
qmv
, with a few flag settings. Thanks for the reminder. 🙂Pingback: text-text-revolution: You can see where this is going | Inconsolation
Pingback: text-text-revolution: You can see where this is going | Linux Admins