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On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, tom brough wrote:
On 23/06/10 21:25, Simon Waters wrote:tom brough wrote:Someone told me recently that as little as 25% of the functionality of an application is ever used. Is anyone aware of any references to research in this area that I can follow up as I am reluctant to use "word of mouth" statistics without some references to sources.GNU "ls" has about 56 command line arguments, and there are at least 26 I've never used in the 25 years or so I've been using it. I guess for command line junkies which options are used might generate some sort of objective measure. Although does it really matter if you've never done "ls --version" since the code is there for the one time you actually need to find this out. I'd have used a lot fewer if I'd code more script in Perl than Bash/Korn/Bourne over the years - does that make "ls" less good in some way?Thanks Simon, I had realised that it was a "how long is a piece of string?" type question. Apologies because I forgot to frame it in the context of costs of those unused functions. From your above analysis it would seem that ls is 50% redundant (from your vast experience) however the point is that if you paid next to nothing to use your ls command (which I assume is correct) 50% of nothing = nothing ... however with proprietary software 50% of significant cost = 50% of significant cost.
I probably use less otions of 'ls' than Simon does, but even though it's free oftware, it's not free in terms of PC resources used - memory, load and execution time. I resent the bloat that's happened over the years, but don't have the time to do anything about it.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html