Re: improving usability by removing the - in the middle of a command

[Jim Meyering]

Bendtsen, Jon wrote:
> On 18/10/2012, at 11.12, Jim Meyering wrote:
>
>> Bendtsen, Jon wrote:
>>
>>> On 18/10/2012, at 10.44, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>>
>>>> Bendtsen, Jon wrote:
>>>>> I here by propose that you remove the - in the middle of any
>>>>> commands. The purpose is to improve the usability because having to
>>>>> type a - in the middle of a command interrupts my keyboard flow, where
>>>>> as not typing it does not.
>>>>>
>>>>> Further more there is only 1 command that has this issue, and that is
>>>>>
>>>>> align-check TYPE N check partition N for TYPE(min|opt) alignment
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the suggestion, but that hyphen makes the command name more
>>>> readable.  Removing it would break scripts using the hyphen, and adding
>>>> an alias would seem to be unwarranted complication for minimal benefit.
>
> Then call it acheck inside parted, you already have other compounded commands:
>       mklabel
>       mktable
>       mkpart
>       mkpartfs
>       mkfs

We won't be changing the name of the parted command.
The suggestion of "acheck" was just for you, in case
you wanted to create your own private shell command.

>>>> Besides, how often do you type commands to parted?
>>>> If you find yourself doing it a lot, I would suggest
>>>> that you script it, if only to decrease possibility of error.
>>>
>>> I type it every time I create a new partition to test that it is
>>> properly aligned.
>>
>> How about creating a shell function?  E.g., put this in your
>> .bashrc (change "acheck" to whatever name you like, and change
>> "opt" to "min" if you'd prefer the latter)
>>
>>    acheck() { parted -s $1 align-check opt $2; }
>>
>> then you'd type only things like this at the command line:
>>
>>    acheck /dev/sdd 1
>>    acheck /dev/sdd 2
>>    ...
>>    acheck /dev/sda 1
>
> Then I would have to run that after running parted, which is even more
> interrupted typing because I have to type a / twice.

If every device name you might type would start with /dev/,
you can hard-code that in the shell command:

    acheck() { parted -s /dev/$1 align-check opt $2; }

Then you wouldn't type any slashes:

      acheck sdd 1
      acheck sdd 2
      ...
      acheck sda 1