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PLAYterm: a New Way To Improve Command Line Skills
chrb writes "Linux Journal points out PLAYterm, an interesting project that offers up recordings of Linux command line sessions, with the aim of helping viewers to improve their skills by watching gurus at work." And there's no bad excuse to link to Neal Stephenson's excellent (and free-to-download in delicious zipped-text form) In the Beginning was the Command Line.
Python wasn't around at the beginning of time. Perl I'm not so sure about. Also, the users of both languages would probably get annoyed at them being called scripting languages. That's just one thing you can do with them.
Add on top of that that scripting in bash or csh is very powerful, and that you can get a lot of things done in a one liner if you know what you're doing...
It's hard to see how you could be more wrong!
guru "unix" command line users know pretty much exactly what they are doing and mostly escape extend their commands and type like there is no tomorrow - you would have to play back these videos in slow motion to really learn from them, command typed, enter pressed, pages of stdout scroll by. nice reference point for learners. the only way to truly learn unix commands and get comfortable with command line tools is to avoid the UI completely. try doing stuff from your tty terminals and disable x11 :) learn to do word processing with latex, telnet into your routers to configure them. if your not up for doing that, forget about using the command line tools. back in the early 90's, we couldn't afford RAM to even start x11 :) i personally use cygwin on windows and terminal on macosx for as much as i can.. never know when you need those command line skills again
According to wikipedia, Stephenson said the following in 2004, right here on /. : "I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of In the Beginning...was the Command Line is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."
Here's the article
CLI = interactive, perl and python are not particularly well adapted to interactive use. And neither perl nor python was around at "the beginning of [UNIX] time", dating from 1987 and 1991 respectively. Perhaps you meant awk? That's a decade closer, published in 1977, but still pretty late. Before that, bourne shell was really the only general purpose scripting language widely available, and as a result grew the capabilites needed to fill that role well.
When I was a lad, we had to enter JCL commands on punch cards! And if you saw someone with a deck of cards in their hands, you could grab them and scatter them on the floor. Have fun sorting them!
This was probably one of the earliest forms of malicious hacking.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"if your not up for doing that, forget about using the command line tools."
That's simple conceit, pure snobbery.
Because I am utterly uninterested in using Latex I should forget about ssh, encfs, apt, yum, git, tar, mencoder, ssh, locate, find, grep, echo, cat etc?
If "your" not up to learning basic English, forget about telling other people in writing what they should or shouldn't be doing.
Either the the supposed "gurus" are actually people who have done nothing more than read the idiots guide to the command line, or we aren't watching them work. Somehow I don't think gurus type out an explanation of what they are doing mid work, somehow I don't think gurus type quite so slowly. Having had a look at these videos they aren't about becoming better at the commandline. They look very basic and require no prior knowledge.
Not that theirs anything wrong with the project, the summary and title are just a load of crap.
I'm actually not quite sure who they are targeting. On the one side they describe how "ls" works, and on the other there's no mention of the tab key, man pages or any of the other really useful things that show what's currently going on and how to get ahead in your terminal session.
For live preview, you'll need LyX and that needs X11.
[La]TeX source does not specify exact layout, and its user should not rely on previews, tweaking the output by issuing random formatting commands until the output looks "right". X and frontends are useful for other purposes, for example, to avoid wasting paper when checking for mistakes in formulas, but this has nothing to do with running a WYSIWYG wordprocessor or imitation of one.
I think, we all went through this discussion when every moron used WYSIWYG HTML generators, and web pages looked like someone vomited markup over a block of text, unless user happened to have exactly the same 800x600 screen and fullscreen IE4 running on it, that "web artist" happened to have.
Which for some users would require them to buy a router supporting telnet, as opposed to a home gateway appliance supporting only HTTP.
All OS used on routers support command line interface. If router does not have command line interface, it was intentionally crippled by manufacturer.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Doing complicated things is often easier and more straightforward in scripting languages than it is on the command line. You might be able to do it faster on the command line if you're clever. Perhaps the real advantage of the CLI however is not that clever people can accomplish things faster there, but it gives them a chance to show us how clever they are. As you say, people usually just share Python snippets, but they show off their CLI scripts with pride.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's incredible that you thought this was relevant to the topic at hand.
If you don't understand the bourne shell (bash, indeed!) then you are boned when you are trying to diagnose boot on some antique Unix system. Since virtually all Unix systems depend heavily on the Bourne or Korn shell you need to know Bourne which will tell you all you need to know, in practice, to troubleshoot the Korn shell scripts actually created by vendors.
You can't call yourself a Unix geek without understanding the Bourne shell, at least tolerably well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GP was probably alluding to the fact that any cli session is already txt... what is the point of videoing txt?? You'll still be reading txt, just in a massively less efficient format.
The Admin and the Engineer
Use python or perl for complex tasks by all means, but they are a poor substitute for what the shell is good for.
It is important to remember that CLIs were the oldest way to interact with a computer system of both. It was made by programmers, to programmers. But, still today, they prefer to have a concise and consistent way of accomplishing their tasks. Guessing positions in an Euclidean plane based on less-than-descriptive tips contained on pictograms and labels isn't something we can call "concise" and "consistent".
Perl was designed for text processing, and at that it excels. Bash was designed for starting and managing sequences of other commands, and at that it excels. Both languages are actually capable of doing the other; but in Perl, executing other programs and keeping track of them is a bit clunky and requires a lot of extra verbiage, and in Bash, doing string parsing is really clunky and requires a lot of extra verbiage.
Moral of the story: choose the right tool for the job.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Perl WAS around at the beginning of time. http://xkcd.com/224/
Why use grep (twice) if you call awk at the end anyway?
Because I have no idea why /[b]luefish/ doesn't match the "awk" line in the process list while /bluefish/ does?