Re: simpler question about my script

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 06:53:26PM +0100, Sysadmin Lists wrote:
> I suspect we're not operating with the same definition of "cleverness" here. 
> I've yet to see genuinely clever code that looked like gibberish; I've seen 
> plenty of gibberish that was meant to be clever and wasn't.

When we say "don't try to be clever", we're referring to the latter.
The types of people who seek help on IRC and this mailing list tend
to have a poor grasp of the fundamentals.  Not always, of course, but
as a general rule it's safer to assume a lack of competence.

"Look at this nifty trick I stumbled upon" is phenomenally unimpressive
when the person in question doesn't know how subshells work, or that bash
has arrays.  (We see this mostly on IRC.)

If you want more sophisticated examples of the type of "attempted
cleverness" we're referring to, there are two prominent ones on
the help-bash and bug-bash mailing lists.  Both of them use aliases
extensively, and think that their code is pretty, when in fact it's
only pretty to the person who wrote it.  Nobody else can understand
it, because it's not really written in bash -- it's one person's
idioglossia. The regulars know who I'm talking about.