[lpi-discuss] Importance of style?

[Bruce Richardson]

Is style important in the context of LPI exam questions?  I noticed,
when taking my exam, that almost all the command line examples where a
text file was to be manipulated were in the form

	cat file.txt | grep ...

Now, this is bad style and can also be bad practice, since it will impose
a significant extra overhead if an operation is going to be repeated
many times (as part of a script, for example).

I mentioned this to someone who took the exam at the same time as me and
they said that the questions may be phrased like that to make it easier
for less experienced people to understand what was going on and that the
imporant thing was that they picked the correct answer.  On the other
hand, I don't think it's asking much for someone to be able to recognise
'grep file.txt' as opposed to 'cat file.txt | grep) and I don't think
it's helpful for the LPI examination questions to be reinforcing bad
practice.

-- 
Bruce

Hierophant: someone who remembers, when you are on the way down,
everything you did to them on the way up.