On: Unix command line conventions over time

[kwijybo]

Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment, also known as Zawinski's Law, states: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

[nonrandomstring → kwijybo]

Caught me out!

I assumed it meant to send the output of the command as mail. That's vaguely useful instead of piping to a cmdline MUA. I couldn't believe I'd been missing this for 30 years and so I tried it on few things like

ps aux --mail=me@domain

error: unknown gnu long option

Looked in my inbox. Nothing.

Then I got to the bottom of the page for the punchline.

grrrr

[sph → kwijybo]

Also the idea that GNU tools are bloated.