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Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag

Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag

Posted Jun 19, 2010 16:31 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag by zzxtty
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag

> A 'script'* would have to spawn a new shell to process the command, rather inefficient.

True. In those situations where you want to switch your proxy 300 times per second, this is very important! ;)

Trading some performance for modularity and maintainability is usually a pretty good idea.


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Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag

Posted Jun 21, 2010 6:50 UTC (Mon) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]

"True. In those situations where you want to switch your proxy 300 times per second, this is very important! ;)"

Well you never know... No, from a performance point of view you are quite right. However I have been in the situation where I've been on machines which are constantly running out of process ids and every little helps (eg: echo *). Admittedly I don't see switching your proxy on and off would be a particularly high priority in such a situation!

"Trading some performance for modularity and maintainability is usually a pretty good idea."

You've lost me slightly there, I would have thought having one .cshrc (or .bashrc?) would be more maintainable than a bin directory full of separate files. I guess we all have our preferred ways of working!

Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag

Posted Jun 25, 2010 10:54 UTC (Fri) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

The PID overrun can also be thwarted by using "exec gconftool..." in the OP's scripts.

My maintainability concern with putting aliases in .bashrc is that only a single shell sees that.

Coming back to performance, the alias solution does incur the (small) per-shell cost of reading, parsing, and keeping in memory the alias, when in most shells you will never need it.

IIRC zsh has one-per-file functions that can reside in a directory somewhere. This is probably the optimal solution here: as maintainable as a shell script, loaded on demand, does not fork a new shell.

Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxTag

Posted Jun 28, 2010 20:01 UTC (Mon) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

Similiar to a source then?

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