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Comment by cpach

8 hours ago

Are you sure you understood the comment you replied to?

I agree that 2>&1 is not complex. But I think I speak for many Bash users when I say that this idiom looks bad, is hard to Google, hard to read and hard to memorize.

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cpach

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skywhopper  7 hours ago

It’s not like someone woke up one morning and decided to design a confusing language full of shortcuts to make your life harder. Bash is the sum of decades of decisions made, some with poor planning, many contradictory, by hundreds of individuals working all over the world in different decades, to add features to solve and work around real world problems, keep backwards compatibility with decades of working programs, and attempt to have a shared glue language usable across many platforms. Most of the special syntax was developed long before Google existed.

So, sure, there are practical issues with details like this. And yet, it is simple. And there are simple methods for learning and retaining little tidbits like this over time if you care to do so. Bash and its cousins aren’t going away, so take notes, make a cheat sheet, or work on a better replacement (you’ll fail and make the problem worse, but go ahead).