Products · Broad category
POSIX
Raised as a usability problem by 39 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 38 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Shell language lacks error handling and scoping, and is hard to work withUnreviewed
20112026- Shell syntax becomes impractical for meaningfully large scripts2026-07-26
- Shell language design is fossilized and hard to work with, with error handling and scoping lacking2023-03-11
- POSIX shell syntax is clunky and odd to write in2018-01-31
Handling filenames with spaces or newlines takes excessive workaroundsUnreviewed
20112026- Trailing spaces in file names get lost or mishandled when copying, pasting, or trimming input2024-10-29
- Handling filenames with spaces or newlines takes excessive effort and workarounds2023-05-01
- Filenames with spaces require careful quoting, making shell use feel like walking a minefield2023-03-11
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 41 complaints
- Shell syntax becomes impractical for meaningfully large scripts2026-07-26
- Etc/GMT+6 means UTC-6, so the sign runs opposite to what people expect2026-05-09
- Escaping input correctly for nested sh -c is hard and error-prone2025-06-10
- Parsing command output into columns requires fragile awk, grep and sed pipelines2025-02-15
- File API is so hard to use that even experts make mistakes2025-01-23
- Trailing spaces in file names get lost or mishandled when copying, pasting, or trimming input2024-10-29
- Handling lists of files with NUL separators is awkward and easy to get wrong2024-10-29
- Recursive permission model is hard for the commenter to understand2023-10-19
- Handling filenames with spaces or newlines takes excessive effort and workarounds2023-05-01
- Filenames with spaces require careful quoting, making shell use feel like walking a minefield2023-03-11
- Shell scripts have terrible error handling, making them hard to maintain2023-03-11
- Shell language design is fossilized and hard to work with, with error handling and scoping lacking2023-03-11
- Commenter couldn't understand the MAC part of the POSIX.1e draft2023-01-20
- Signal handlers can't safely call most functions, and multiple signals get silently merged2022-12-10
- Whitespace quoting rules in sh scripts cause error-prone handling of variables and paths2022-11-01
- Socket API is confusing and hard for newcomers to learn2022-07-21
- Join waits on only one designated thread, so waiting for any of a group is awkward2021-11-26
- Confusing consistency semantics, unreliable renames, and fsync surprises for developers2021-06-03
- Hard to do desired things with signals; trap info inaccessible to handlers and debuggers2021-05-17
- Whitespace mistakes cause errors and error handling is unreliable2020-12-21
- POSIX file APIs are unsafe by default and hard to use correctly for data integrity2020-11-14
- Standard is outdated and has bad user experience for command-line tools2020-09-18
- Users must turn to online search and StackOverflow because man pages don't meet their needs2020-09-04
- Without arrays or hash maps, shell code needs unreadable workarounds2020-08-25
- Silent failures and many hidden pitfalls make correct scripts very hard to write2020-02-02
- Must hand-build multi-wait events from eventfd and epoll, which is error-prone and needs separate event classes2019-07-31
- Complex pipelines are hard; users must use temp files or juggle file descriptors2018-12-28
- Leaves subtle decisions to implementations, so code breaks in corner cases2018-11-29
- Library calls fail with EINTR and undocumented restart behavior forces retry logic everywhere2018-04-17
- Developers must navigate undocumented, inconsistent, error-prone fsync steps that are hard to understand and test2018-03-30
- POSIX shell syntax is clunky and odd to write in2018-01-31
- Permission changes must be applied to each file and folder, so trees take hours2017-09-06
- Programmers find these APIs hard to use correctly: races, inheritance and wakeup behaviour are error-prone2017-05-09
- Permissions repeatedly break, needing admins to fix them again and again2017-02-12
- Close is impossible to call correctly cross-platform because EINTR retry behavior differs2017-02-11
- IO and locking APIs are non-portable and painful, leading to misleading, hard-to-review code2016-10-31
- Escaping a single quote requires an awkward close-escape-reopen sequence2016-04-21
- Tool interfaces have special cases and contradictory parameters, only usable after years of practice2015-12-21
- POSIX lock semantics are so odd that developers struggle to use them correctly2014-05-16
- Shell language is primitive with ugly quirks that make programming it harder2013-12-29
- Same POSIX APIs behave differently across Solaris, AIX and HP-UX, forcing constant fixes2011-10-02