Re: [Gnu-arch-users] another poke at the special chars

[Adam Spiers]

Miles Bader (address@hidden) wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 12:30:23PM +0000, Adam Spiers wrote:
> > I also object to this "severely broken" label; as I have stated before
> > on this list it is both optional and remarkably useful, so useful in
> > fact that I would find a workaround for the arch usage rather than
> > turn it off.
> 
> No doubt it is useful, but I don't think it's useful enough to justify
> another magic character that mutates input in surprising ways.  They easily
> could have added a riff on an existing magic character instead, as Tom
> showed.
> 
> [I often want to get the path of an executable too, but it's certainly at
> least order of magnitude less often than e.g., using a home dir (~).]

Interesting.  I tried the following:

  history 1 | perl -lne '/history 1/&&next;/ =[a-z]/i&&$e++;m, 
~/,&&$t++;END{print "= $e\n~ $t"}'

At work:

= 79
~ 74

At home:

= 61
~ 45

On my public mail/web server:

= 60
~ 160

~ wins, but they are the same order of magnitude.  Bear in mind that
the easier a feature is to use, the more useful it becomes, hence the
more you are likely to use it.  I'm pretty sure I use zsh's equals
substitution *far* more often these days than I used to type `which
foo`.