I love how the Unix commands have such intuitive naming.
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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*?
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@kamstrup or there are 2 where the name mirrors each-other like adduser useradd just for lols
@annehargreaves @kamstrup I really like the naming of the cat/tac pair.
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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
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@angusm @jay @annehargreaves @kamstrup I used to write (and maintain) man pages for a living. What does that make *me*?
@cstross @angusm @jay @annehargreaves @kamstrup
A survivor.
Rule 1, Charlie, Rule 1. -
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 "man" if you need something explained at you
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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
DD because it's a funny reference to OS/360
AWK because the author initials
Excel because it's a excellent Visicalc
Edge because browsers are edgy
Safari because the internet is a jungle
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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 @cstross @annehargreaves @kamstrup There used to be a time when the gold standard for a man page was "You should be able to reverse engineer the program from this manpage". I recently tried to work out how to configure Thermald. Those days are long long gone.
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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 You have to grepulate it within the string.
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@kamstrup or fsck when you need to fsck
@renardboy @kamstrup fsck arnd && fnd out
