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One thing to try is looking for devices with a particular logo on it (yes! that goes against the whole point of your article! but wait...).

The USB logo! Because the device would have to comply to have the USB logo printed on it.

That's not much of a guarantee, as it is easily counterfeit, but still better than nothing in this abyss of low-cost high-price devices.



Thank you! I laughed a lot. In the end receiving spam can be very fun.


Do one thing and do it well, but...

- If more and less are split in two: more does not page well (no scrollback), and less does two jobs: paging and blocking the scrolling.

- If more gets dropped in favor of less: less is a rather good pager, and serve only its own purpose of paging lines of text in different way.


Fortunately, `more` may be a very small piece of software and may not clutter the /bin too much. Moreover it may already be used by some scripts displaying long output they want user to read briefly.

But there may be (much) larger softwares superseded by more modern versions, both present on the os.


I believed busybox's grep to be faster as it was very small, with GNU version slower due to the many features added over the time, but it is quite not true! On a slow device as some evoked said, the difference is highly noticeable.


That's actually an important point. It's easy to misinterpret

"The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing."

Busybox's grep is small and simple. GNU grep is big and complex, which is actually why it's faster. It does a lot of work to avoid doing a lot of work.


Oh, so 'do practically nothing' rather than 'be practically nothing'. I understand now.


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