Content-Type: text/shitpost


Subject: Another trivial utility: do-over
Path: you​!your-host​!ultron​!gormenghast​!qwerty​!fpuzhpx​!plovergw​!plover​!shitpost​!mjd
Date: 2018-06-29T16:52:35
Newsgroup: rec.food.cooking.do-over
Message-ID: <9bc08710636adbfc@shitpost.plover.com>
Content-Type: text/shitpost

I have been waffling for several days about whether to post this. Argument in favor:

I really like this command! A lot!

Argument against:

I don't understand why, since it doesn't actually do anything.

It's called do-over and it's just a glorified loop. You say something like

    do-over command args....

and it replies

    Hit <enter> to start

When you hit enter, it runs command args, and then it prompts again:

    Job completed in 12.3s
    Hit <enter> to re start

If someone else were showing me this, I would ask:

Why is this better than hitting the up-arrow and then enter?

or possibly

Why is this better than while read x; do command...; done?

I have no answer to these questions. But I have done a lot of both of those other things, and I like this better, although I don't know why.

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    use Time::HiRes qw(time);

    print STDERR "Hit <enter> to start\n";
    while (1) {
          my $x = <STDIN>;
          last unless $x;
          print STDERR scalar(localtime()), "\n";
          my $start = time();
          print STDERR "running @ARGV\n";
          system(@ARGV);
          my $elapsed = time() - $start;
          printf STDERR "Job completed in %.1fs\n", $elapsed;
          print STDERR "Hit enter to restart\n"; 
    }