I spent part of today writing a quick one-off data conversion program.The core of it was a function that filtered items from a list througha number of things in order to sort them into the right category. Oncethe dust settled on all of the sorting needed, the function had quite alot of stock arguments, things that didn't vary from call to call in myprogram. In fact, an unwieldy number of them.

There are at least three vaguely Pythonic options for how to deal with

Here is an irritation that gets me every so often: the Bourne shell hasno wildcard match operator that you can use in if checks and the like.You can do wildcard matches, but only in case statements.

(Bash has the [[ =~ ]] operator, but it uses regular expressionsinstead of shell wildcards. I know, I pick nits, but shell wildcards areoften simpler and they match what you use in other sh contexts.)

This comes up surprisingly often, at least in the sort

The ZFS uberblock is the root of the tree of ZFS objects in a pool(technically it is more a pointer to the root, but it's how ZFS findseverything). Because it is the root, it has to be updated on every ZFSupdate. Also, because it is so important ZFS keeps quite a lot of copiesof it (and has a clever 'copy on write' scheme for it, so that it is notquite updated in place).

Given the impact of writes on mirrors