A perfect example of horrible design

The vorbiscomment command of the Vorbis toolset is one of the most poorly designed pieces of software that I've had the misfortune of using in a long time. The tool can be used to either add a new comment to an ogg file, or entirely replace all comments. It can not be used to update an existing comment. It's a clear violation of "make the common case simple, and the uncommon possible." Updating, or modifying, comments is the one, most common, thing a user might want to do -- and you can't do that with vorbiscomment.

Here's a use case: you rip a CD, and accidentally enter the wrong DISCNUMBER -- say, 1 instead of 3 -- and you're left with 16 ripped songs all with good metadata, except for the DISCNUMBER. How do you fix this with vorbiscomment? Well, if the tool was not totally stupid, you'd do something like this:

$ nonstupidvorbiscomment -u -t "DISKNUMBER=3" *.ogg

or, if (for whatever reason) you need to perform a more complex search:

$ find . -regex ".*/Album/.*\.ogg" -exec \
  nonstupidvorbiscomment -u -t "DISCNUMBER=3" {} \;

But you can't do that, because vorbiscomment doesn't have a "-u" (update) argument. No, all you get is -w (write) and -a (add). So you end up doing something like this:`

$ find . -regex ".*/Album/.*\.ogg" -exec  \
   echo vorbiscomment -l \"{}\" \|      \
   sed \'s/DISCNUMBER=1/DISCNUMBER=3/\' \
   vorbiscomment -w -c - \"{}\"         \; > runme.sh
$ ./runme.sh
$ rm runme.sh

Yeah, that's slick. Not. Somebody should have reviewed vorbiscomment before letting it be released. d.