The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[n0dalus]

On 3/26/06, Shane Stixrud <shane at geeklords.org> wrote:
>
> Sed is a wonderful tool, but it is highly limited by the fact its user
> must take into account whole file(s) for each expression, this is further
> complicated when one must consider the file may change over time.  The
> complexity and readability of regular expression tools is much higher than
> should be required to change OS/application variables.
>
> Creating new files or appending to the end of existing files with "echo"
> only takes one so far.  This also tends to have the cost of hurting
> readability as it is often the case you would prefer putting data
> somewhere else in the file (i.e. sed).
>
> The nature of flat configuration files where each application has its own
> format is such where recovery and/or applying changes only if they have
> not been already applied is too complex and hurts readability far to much
> to be attempted in a simple shell script.
>

One tool I did not see you list is `patch`. A context diff can still
work even when the file has changed significantly, and the format is
extremely readable (just + or -.) Maintaining a collection of diffs is
going to be significantly easier to manage than dealing with a large
number of cp/mv/echo/sed commands in shell files. There are also a
variety of tools made to deal with diffs and can show them in
graphical, friendly ways.

There might be a good reason not to use diff/patch for doing what you
want, but I think that it could save a few headaches.

n0dalus.