There is a special place in Hell…
There is a special place in Hell reserved for the person who invented the UNIX command ls. That’s EL-ES. It’s the command that prints a list of all the files in a directory, and like any well-mannered UNIX program, it accepts a whole heap of options.
Specifically, it accepts an option called -l which is very commonly used, because it prints a long format listing, with useful extra information on each file.
But it also accepts a much rarer option called -1, which is used a lot less often, which makes it print a list with each file name in a single line.
Of course, I’m working in a terminal (using the most excellent TeraTerm app), and I’m using a fine font called Courier New, and I’m reading a print-out formatted by a text-to-postscript program and printed two-pages-in-one, with small print, and the difference between -l (MINUS EL) and -1 (MINUS ONE) is about 2 pixels.
It is now 01:55 AM. I am still at work because I had a problem with some data I’m preparing. Some data ? OK, a lot of data.
And the first step of everything depends on listing a bunch of files and writing that list to a file (which I think is used as input to a very ardorous and slow indexing process which I’m re-running now – at least I hope so…). And the person who wrote the command that does that actually knows about -1.
What’s the difference between the command: ls *.seq > foo and ls -1 *.seq > foo ?
Nothing, really.
But ls -l (EL ES MINUS EL) is right off…
There’s a special corner of Hell for people like this…