Nik282000

man find tells me that you should be using the -exec flag should be used if you want to do some operation on the files you find one at a time, using man to learn about a tool before you use it is also the Unix Way. (It also mentions the --delete flag as well as the gotchas that come along with using it).

I will agree that for some complicated tasks that a lot of users might want to do a lot of times, for example downloading videos from YouTube, all encompassing tools are are good idea. yt-dlp has hundreds of functions to cover all the things a user might want to do, but even it relies on outside tools like ffmpeg to get the job done.

For the single case where a user wants to find then delete a bunch of files, the --delete flag makes sense, but having the function of find overlap with the function of rm adds complexity to the codebase of find without matching the feature set of find + rm.

You’re gonna think I’m a asshole but, chaining find and rm seems like the best way because you get to keep all the options of rm instead of having only the less flexible option of -deleting every match.

Writing a tool that does only one thing looks like avoiding the most complicated task. Which leads to a conclusion that the Unix way only works well in a rather small fraction of use cases; the majority of cases are better served by different approaches.

The alternative to do-one-thing is do-lots-of-things.

Users very often need results that can only be achieved after doing several things. With only single-purpose tools at hand, users have to integrate them. In other words, the tool authors delegate integration to the users.

You describe a need for all-singing, all-dancing solutions over single use tools.

Qualification: I am a certified moron, I used nano as my IDE for 8 years because I did not know about VS code. I still structure my python like the qbasic I learned in school. I have never mastered object oriented thinking.

Write your scrips one chunk at a time, make them modular, make intermediate scripts if you have to, and have each part output a data structure that you nail down early in the project. Having a ass-load of little parts chained together means you can tweak or entirely replace tools at a later date without fucking the whole process.

If your project is a monolithic do-all be-all monster it means even the tiniest change involves reevaluating your entire codebase. You’re giving yourself all the problems of cuckcoding with none of the time savings.