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

[Bendtsen, Jon]

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


>>> 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.





JonB