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eza (formerly exa, ls replacement) can now show the actual total size of directory contents
(discuss.tchncs.de)
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It's written in a safe language
Not sure that really applies here since ls is usually a shell built-in so you can't exactly uninstall it, not to mention all this feature creep probably means exa/eza has a much larger attack surface.
Does it use safe development practices though? Or is mainstream Rust development npm leftpad all over again with developers dumpster diving for dependencies to make their lives easier and more productive.
There is potentially a price to pay for colour ansi graphics and emoji and it comes in the form of a large tree of often trivial third party crates of unknown quality which could potentially contain harmful code. Is it all audited? Do I want it on a company server with customer data or even on a desktop with my own data?
The various gnu and bsd core utils are maintained by their projects and are self contained without external dependencies and have history. There are projects rewriting unix core utils in Rust (uutils) that seem to be less frivolous which are more to my taste. Most traditional unix utils have very limited functionality and have been extensively analyzed over many years by both people and tools which offsets a lot of the deficiencies of the implementation language.
I am inclined to agree with you. See my comment in cross post of this thread.
I'm just a home admin of my own local systems and while I try to avoid doing stuff that's too wacky, in the context I don't mind playing a bit fast n loose. If I screw it up, the consequences are my own.
At work, I am an end user of systems with much higher grade of importance to lots of people. I would not be impressed to learn there was a bunch of novel bleeding edge stuff running on those systems. Administering them has a higher burden of care and responsibility and I expect the people in charge to apply more scrutiny. If it's screwed up, the consequences are on a lot of people with no agency over the situation.
Just like other things done at small vs large scale. Most people with long hair don't wear a hairnet when cooking at home, although it is a requirement in some industrial food prep situations. Most home fridges don't have strict rules about how to store different kinds of foods to avoid cross contamination, nor do they have a thermometer which is checked regularly and logged to show the food is being stored appropriately. Although this needs to be done in a professional context. Pressures, risks and consequences are different.
To summarize: I certainly hope sysadmins aren't on here installing every doohicky some dumbass like me suggests on their production systems. :D
there's no such thing as safe language. People sent spaceships to moon with assembly. But there is one such thing as undereducated bootcamp grad developer.
We have tried the "sufficiently experienced and disciplined developer" approach for decades and it just doesn't work.
You're both right!
True but when people speak of rust being safe they actually mean the way it deals with memory and that it is harder to arbitrability view the mem space it uses unlike C and it's children.