Alright, so you wanna know about this “shell we golf” thing? It wasn’t some grand project or anything. For me, it all kicked off ’cause I was just plain bored out of my mind at my old job. Seriously, mind-numbingly dull stuff sometimes.
How It All Began
I used to work this gig where, every so often, I’d have to babysit these ancient scripts that ran overnight. Picture this: me, a flickering monitor, and lines of text slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y scrolling by. Pure excitement, right? To keep myself from nodding off, I started poking around in the terminal. You know, the command line. Just typing stuff, seeing what happened.
At first, it was the usual stuff: ls to see files, cd to move around, maybe a grep to find something in a log. But then, I guess the boredom really set in, and a weird thought popped into my head: “I wonder how ridiculously short I can make these commands?” Not for any good reason, just… because. That’s how my little adventure into what I guess you could call ‘shell golfing’ started.
Down the Rabbit Hole
My first target was something simple. Like, say, I wanted to find all the text files in a folder and count ’em. Normally, you might do something like ls -1 grep '.txt$' wc -l. Works fine, tells you the number. But it felt… long. Too many pipes, too many characters.
So, I’d start tinkering. Could I use find instead? Maybe find . -maxdepth 1 -name '.txt' -print wc -l. Hmm, still a bit wordy. What about some shell trickery? I’d spend ages, and I mean ages, trying to shave off just a few characters. My colleagues would walk by, see me muttering at my screen, and probably think I was losing it. And maybe I was, a little.
I remember trying to get the last modified file in a directory. You can do it with a chain of commands, but I became obsessed with making it a single, super-compact line. It was like a personal challenge. Most of the time, the ‘shorter’ versions I came up with were completely unreadable. If I looked at them a week later, I’d have no clue what they did. So much for being efficient, eh?
There was this one time I spent a whole afternoon trying to get a directory listing sorted by size, but only show the top 3, and make the command shorter than the standard way. I think I ended up using some unholy combination of ls, sort, head, and a bunch of weird flags I’d never use in real life. The ‘saved’ characters were probably less than ten. But hey, I did it!
Was It Worth It?
Looking back, this whole shell golf thing was a bit of a silly obsession. It wasn’t about writing better or more maintainable scripts. Most of the time, it was the opposite. My ‘golfed’ commands were often cryptic messes.
So, what did I actually get out of it?
- It was a decent brain teaser. Honestly, trying to find the shortest way to do something forces you to learn a lot about how shell commands and their options really work. You discover weird flags and tricks you’d never normally encounter.
- It taught me the value of clarity. Seeing how unreadable my ‘clever’ short commands became made me realize that for any real work, readability is king. If your team (or your future self) can’t understand it, it’s bad code, no matter how short it is.
- Sometimes, you find a genuinely neat trick. Every now and then, in the quest for shortness, I’d stumble upon a genuinely elegant and concise way to do something that was still readable. Those were the little victories.
- It definitely made me faster with tools like
awkandsed. When you’re trying to avoid extra pipes, you lean hard on the power tools.
So yeah, ‘shell we golf’? It was a phase. A weird, nerdy phase born out of extreme boredom. I wouldn’t recommend making your production scripts into golfed nightmares. But as a way to kill time and accidentally learn a few things about the command line? Sure, why not. Just don’t tell your boss you’re spending hours saving three characters on a command nobody else will ever understand.
