absolutely the case. i'm new to Linux and wasn't around in the good old terminal only days - the abbreviations are arcane
why is ch change directory but chmod is change mode? why not cm? or chd?
i had to look this one up because the only explanation i was given for the name of the command dd was 'disk destroyer'. had to go into some old forum to learn that cc was already taken for make and so they just went to the next letter down the line??
it's buck wild in there. i like it, but i've taken to just treating some commands like magic spells because the commands are so impenetrable
Yeah disk destroyer or data deleter or whatever is the old joke, not it's actual name. For those unaware, dd has often been used for stuff like overwriting a file with random noise as a homespun secure delete function, and it can do a lot of damage with small typos in the command.
Oh, really? Interesting. While... odd, I always thought it appropriate to be extra explicit with dd, where for some common uses you've the chance of nuking the wrong disk.
At this point recommending dd really is kind of telling the other person to go fuck themselves. It doesn't even follow the arg format of every other unix command. I had to double check to see if anyone fixed that in the interim. Nope, still a=b syntax, rather than -i device1 -o device2.
That really should be a giant clue that it shouldn't be used by anyone, for any reason. "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."
I still occasionally stumble on the sequencing of arguments for chmod/chown and I can’t tell you off the top of my head which demands -r or -R. I’ve been doing this for years.
All I ever wanted was to type ^C (or perhaps ^\) in my terminal and kill in one fell swoop all the shite that my previous shell-typed command spawned directly or indirectly.
This, IIRC used to be the standard behavior back in the days, but in recent years, for some reasons, things have not been so simple.
Looking at the man page of ps(1) sort of starts to elucidate the effing mess that the name "group" summons the in unix process world.
Are we talking about the real group id (RGID), the effective group id (EGID), the controlling progress group id (TPGID), the control group (CGROUP) the textual group id (EGROUP), the filesystem group id (FGID), the textual filesystem group id (FGID), the process id of the process group leader (PGID), the saved group id (SGID), the session id (SID), the supplementary group id (SUPGID), the thread group id (TGID) ?
Although this seems like a good idea, I wouldn't like typing an extra symbol. Maybe I'm just irrational.
Instead of prefixing my commands, I just search for a command in a manpage repo, cht.sh [0], and with my package manager (`dnf provides` for the DNF package manager). If nothing shows up, I'm probably safe. The process is easy to automate.
A nitpick, just in case you haven't noticed and would want to make the correction, in the text you say:
> In the example above, you see my username "limedaring", and my computer name, “Orion,”
but the examples say "username@computer".
Another nitpick, I wonder if readers might see the commands in uppercase and think that those should work too. I can imagine them seeing "command not found" when trying them out and not realize that it's because LS != ls to the shell.
Yet another, maybe it'd be a good idea to include `cp -r` and `cp -rv`. I don't know, it might add to the intimidation, but I imagine that's also a basic operation they'll want and miss when doing `cp dir/`.
Great work, by the way. CLIs are great and in many if not most cases far more powerful than GUIs, but they're often taken as old and useless by the general public because they were more prevalent back before GUIs were common. It's great to see something aimed to be more easily digestible for the general public. Maybe CLIs can get more appreciation this way.
He spent an hour trying to quit? Did it ever occur to him to use C-z? That's pretty standard in Unix, and would have dropped him back to the terminal so he could kill it easily. He's acting like C-x C-c is somehow WAY more arcane than :q!. To each his own, I suppose.
why is ch change directory but chmod is change mode? why not cm? or chd?
i had to look this one up because the only explanation i was given for the name of the command dd was 'disk destroyer'. had to go into some old forum to learn that cc was already taken for make and so they just went to the next letter down the line??
it's buck wild in there. i like it, but i've taken to just treating some commands like magic spells because the commands are so impenetrable
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