[Kc] Last night's meeting a success

[Andrew Moore]

Hey David -

Yeah, I had a good time, too. Thanks for the pointers on using find
and the "xargs echo" trick.

I'm pretty sure they comped your pepsi, so you can put those savings
towards building the tipjar empire.

Looking forward to next month!
-A


On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:28 AM, David Nicol <davidnicol at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought so at least.  Thanks for listening to me hold forth on
> Macrame, Tipjar, Advenge.
>
> I am actively imagining (if such a thing is possible, or productive)
> an economy in "tuits" which can be exchanged to participating geeks
> for tuit-sized tasks such as adding a feature to a module.  A
> correspondence between a standard tuit and a standard "function point"
> makes sense, although standardizing the granularity of function points
> seems impossible to do formally.
>
> Andrew Moore agreed with my criticism of /bin/find -exec and
> appreciated the method I presented for mitigating the risk of
> /bin/find -exec mowing the baby, which is as follows.
>
> 1:  several iterations of
>    find . -name '*.txt' -size +20 -ls | head
> to get the selextion criteria to work right, then drop the -ls switch
> to get a simple list of file names
>
> 2:  instead of using -exec .... \;, pipe the results of the above
> through xargs echo to compose what you want to do with the files
>    find . -name '*.txt' -size +10  | xargs -n5 echo gzip | head
> until you are generating a script that does what you need
>
> 3: replace the final |head with |sh to run the program.
>
> This exercise generally takes less time than reading "man find" to
> find out how to properly escape special characters in the exec clause,
> and you don't have to run code you haven't had a chance to vet
> visually.
>
>
> I owe someone a fractional tuit for my pepsi, if it made it into the
> evening's bistromath.  I realized when I was about a mile away that I
> had, as it were, sipped and slid.
>
> --
> "Every man a god, that is if you can qualify.  You can't be the god of
> anything unless you can do it" -- William S. Burroughs
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