I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming.
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@khleedril @kamstrup
$ alias please="sudo"Go on, you know you want to.
@boggin Random tip: make it alias please="sudo " (with a space at the end) and bash will autocomplete commands as the next word (no idea if it works in any other shell)
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@kamstrup On a totally unrelated matter, I love it that in Apple II, `cat` listed files, while in Un*x it echoes their contents.
@tomminieminen @kamstrup catalog vs catenate. The perils of abbreviation (not something UNIX is afraid of).
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@annehargreaves @kamstrup Yes, but adduser and useradd came from different parallel universe dialects of unix, it's just that we live in a multiverse that supports crossovers and team-ups
@cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup Oh yeah, like the good rename command and the bad rename command.
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@jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup also man crontab v.s. man 5 crontab v.s. man 8 crontab "of COURSE 8 means programs and 5 means config"
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I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup e-ll-ing a folders content
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@annehargreaves @kamstrup Yes, but adduser and useradd came from different parallel universe dialects of unix, it's just that we live in a multiverse that supports crossovers and team-ups
@cstross The masterpiece of that convergence is "ps", where options include both "f" and "-f", with different meanings
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I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup
Like people remember where they were on 9/11, I remember vividly my first "shutdown -h now" on some BSD variant I just installed some 25 years ago.My first non Microsoft install. Felt like magic.
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@kamstrup so often I found myself wishing to print my regular expressions globally but lacked a pithy and intuitive command. then came --
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I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup or fsck when you need to fsck
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@jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup The best `man` pages are written to be so opaque that the only people who can understand the `man` page are people who don't need the `man` page because they know it all already.
Or possibly because they wrote the `man` page themselves.
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@kamstrup and cat if you need a cat
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I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup Let alone git and gimp.
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@annehargreaves @kamstrup Yes, but adduser and useradd came from different parallel universe dialects of unix, it's just that we live in a multiverse that supports crossovers and team-ups
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I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup
‘cat’, however, seems not to do what the name implies—which is, indeed, very on brand. -
I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup you chown’d that one.
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@jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup also man crontab v.s. man 5 crontab v.s. man 8 crontab "of COURSE 8 means programs and 5 means config"
@xabean @jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup old enough to remember system V where you knew which part of man you wanted for system calls, library functions or command line programs
But they were also more gentle times when people were actually paid to write useful documentation and the man pages were actually helpful
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@kamstrup
Actually, you can also use them to tell a short story like:
unzip | strip | touch | finger | grep | mount | fsck | unmount | sleep@dsw Except it's “umount” because the mental energy required to remember to leave out the “n” is less than the physical energy required to press just press the damn key, especially on an ASR33. /s
(Actually, last time I made a comment about this I was told that the reason was that very very early Unixes limited command lengths to 6 characters. There are two interpretations of the word “backward” in the phrase “backward compatibility”.)
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@kamstrup
Yep! You can't grep dead trees. -
I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming. Like 'find' if you need to find a file, or 'grep' if you need to grep for a string
@kamstrup and for non-English speakers ?

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@jay @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup The best `man` pages are written to be so opaque that the only people who can understand the `man` page are people who don't need the `man` page because they know it all already.
Or possibly because they wrote the `man` page themselves.
@angusm @jay @annehargreaves @kamstrup I used to write (and maintain) man pages for a living. What does that make *me*?
