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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Satisfactory has quite the satisfactory railway mechanics: in addition to what you say you want with them, you also have to place proper semaphores in order not to have them crashing each other.

    Efficient networks require roundabouts and double one-way tracks, but sometimes it’s much more convenient to either have maze-like single one-way tracks (makes paths longer) or two-way tracks (blocks traffic, and gets worse the longer it is).

    … there is no “intellgence” with vehicle paths, though: trucks and trains always pick the shortest path, and if they’ve gotta wait, they’re gonna wait (unless you screw up the semaphores, in which case kaboom).








  • If the path to the dir is longer than $HOME, say, $HOME/Tools/modding/hd2-audio-modder/wwise/v123456789_idr_but_its_a_long_one/random file name with spaces, it makes more sense.

    I’ll try using the braces syntax, if it does prevent word splitting I wasn’t aware of it, though it’s still slightly inconvenient (3 key inputs for each brace on my kb) and I’d probably still use quotes instead if I had to use Bash and had the file path in a variable for some reason.

    … though at this point I’m probably overthinking it, atm I don’t recall better examples of my distaste for Bash expansion shenanigans.


    Did some testing, here’s what I found.
    Beware, it devolves into a rant against Bash and has little to do with the original topic - I just needed to scream into the void a little.

    # Zsh
    function argn { echo $#; }
    
    var='spaced string'
    argn $var
    # Prints 1: makes sense, no word splitting here
    
    var=(array 'of strings')
    argn $var
    # Prints 2: makes sense, I'm using a 2-wide array where I would
    #           want 2 arguments (the second one happens to have
    #           a whitespace in it)
    
    # Bash
    function argn { echo $#; }
    
    var='spaced string'
    argn $var
    # Prints 2: non-array variable gets split in 2 with this simple reference;
    #           I hate it, but hey, it is what it is
    
    argn ${var}
    # Prints 2: no, braces do not prevent word splitting as I think you suggested
    
    var=(array 'of strings')
    argn $var
    # Prints 1: ... what?
    
    echo $var
    # Prints array: ... what?!?
    #               It implicitly takes the first element?
    #               At least it doesn't word-split said first element, right?
    
    var=('array of' strings)
    argn $var
    # Prints 2:
    


    Upon further investigation:

    # Bash
    mkdir /tmp/bashtest ; cd /tmp/bashtest
    touch 'file 1'
    touch 'file 2'
    
    stat file*
    # Prints the expected output of 'stat' called on both files;
    # no quotes or anything, globbing just expands into
    # 2 arguments without *word* splitting
    
    files=('file 1' 'file 2')
    stat $files
    # stat: cannot statx 'file'
    # stat: cannot statx '1'
    # WHY? WHY DOES GLOBBING ACT SENSIBLY WHEN ARRAYS DO NOT?
    

    I get that the Bash equivalent to Zsh’s $array is ${array[@]}, but making $array behave like it does in Bash has no advantage whatsoever.
    … IS WHAT I WOULD SAY IF THAT WERE TRUE! YOU ALSO HAVE TO QUOTE "${array[@]}" BECAUSE WE LOVE QUOTES HERE AT BASH HQ!

    # ... continued from before
    stat "prefix ${files[@]}"
    # stat: cannot statx 'prefix file 1'
    # (regular 'stat' output for 'file 2')
    

    While this behavior doesn’t make much sense to me, it also doesn’t make sense for me to write that “prefix” within the quotes in the first place, right?
    YES. BECAUSE SPLITTING IS NOT WHAT YOU EXPECT WHEN YOU PUT STUFF IN QUOTES.

    Sorry, I’ll stop.


  • Expansion matters because using parameters without quotes automatically splits words, and IIRC a quoted array parameter can still be split into its members — as opposed to Zsh, where word splitting doesn’t happen unprompted and quoted array parameters are flattened into a single string.

    Generally if I want to run $HOME/random executable with spaces.exe through Wine in a terminal I copy the path in Dolphin (CTRL+SHIFT+C, or CTRL+ALT+C idr) and paste it, within quotes if needed (the four extra key inputs are the annoying part).

    I find that much faster than manually typing find "$HOME" -name "random executable with spaces.exe" -type x -exec wine "{}" \;, or opening an editor to insert backslashes.