I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs

A programmer dropped bashumerate, a tiny helper meant to make repetitive command-line chores feel less annoying, and the internet instantly turned it into a full-blown tools war. The pitch is simple enough for non-experts: instead of remembering different ways to repeat the same action over files, lines, numbers, or lists, you get one pattern with a little {} placeholder. The creator sold it as a cure for the usual “please don’t break on spaces” panic that comes with older methods.

But the comments? That’s where the sparks flew. One camp basically shrugged and said, “We already have this,” with one user firing off the classic old-school answer: find -print0 | xargs -0 .... Another critic went even harder, asking what the point even is if you still have to remember options, and arguing that simple loops already do the job. In other words: why invent a new shortcut when the drawer is already full of them?

Then came the meme brigade. Someone posted the obligatory XKCD standards comic — the internet’s universal way of saying, “Ah yes, another tool claiming to unify everything by becoming one more thing.” And in walked the power-user faction to say, actually, if you want a replacement for xargs, GNU Parallel is the heavyweight champ, complete with a safety-preview mode that makes people brave enough to batch-delete stuff without sweating. So while bashumerate is being praised as neat, tiny, and practical, the crowd drama is deliciously familiar: clean new idea or yet another command nobody asked for?