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Comment by lalalandland | Hacker News Reader

"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. "

One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are

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I have learned unix with sunOs in 1990. Man pages were excellent. The first command I learned was "man man". There was a paper version of the man pages available in the computer room (among many other sun documentations). I became pissed by man pages only when I switched to linux. At that time, I have discovered the crypt(3) command by looking at the index of man pages. One week later, I had cracked 10% of passwords of the school (creating my own dictionary).

I remember getting new Sun workstations at that time and part of the fun of getting new Suns was taking the boxes of printed documentation that came with them and slotting them into the supplied ring folders.

Later on they would ship the Adobe red/blue/green PostScript books with OpenWindows.

A full set of Vax documentation was at least the size of the Vax. I still have my 3 volume copy of HPUX's man page.

Including the famous bug for tunefs which is still current in FreeBSD (talk about slack in addressing the real issues!):

"You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish."

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tunefs&sektion=8#e...

The docset was large, but it was not as large as a VAX.

I had to learn VMS in a hurry in the last two months of 1986. I had the full binder set on a shelf in my toilet (Cambridge, UK). You could not have put a VAX in there :)

> "You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish."

Well of course not; that would be "tunefsh", which no one has gotten around to writing.

DEC documentation was always very good but then it was a product you paid for.

Lots of people paid lots of money to DEC and Sun and HP and IBM and others for Unix as well.

PowerShell takes the UNIX philosophy, cranks it up to 11, and makes commands trivially discoverable.

How to discover commands?

Powershell pretty much has universal tab-complete. Typing a command, '-', and repeatedly hitting tab will cycle through all available arguments for that command, and arguments will be quite consistent between commands. But you can also tab complete variable names and the commands themselves.

Discovering the cmdlets is not as trivial as it could be, because they are named verb-first instead of noun first. Get-<tab> is not as useful as NetAdapter-<tab> might be, but since things are named sensibly you can do a little guess work and use tab-completion to find what you're looking for in the vast majority of cases.

> Discovering the cmdlets is not as trivial as it could be, because they are named verb-first instead of noun first

Irrelevant. Use

    Get-Command *network    #network anywhere in noun
    gcm *-network*          #network as first word in noun

PowerShell has it all, its just that people don't bother to learn it.

Which good documentation do you recommend?

Poweshell in depth, or in month of launches.

But, experience is more important. Simply do everything in posh, even if there is a handy gui. After a few months you are closer to pro then with any books.

should't the first one be "network as last word"?

Indeed. My bad.

There are things that powershell does well, but I wouldn't say that it's really all that unixey. It relies far too heavily for the user to have an understanding of the windows object model, which frankly a lot of sysadmins don't have and refuse to learn. In unices the pipeline is just that, a way to send a stream of bytes from one place to another. In pwsh it's more complicated than that since it passes an object along with the preceding command's metadata.

In my personal experience, powershell is fantastic for writing scripts and tooling, but not really so great for actual use as a shell. What makes a good shell is speed and 'muscle memory', imo.

Thats nonsense really. What windows object model ???

Your 'simple' pipeline becomes hard core once you take into account all other things you require like grep, awk, sed, xargs, mount etc. Hack, even basic boolean stuff is from another dimension with executables like `[` or `true/false` (yeah, I know mostly builtin nowdays)

> your 'simple' pipeline becomes hard core once you take into account all other things you require like grep, awk, sed, xargs, mount etc.

That's the whole point of unix. Non-integrated tools that talk to each other using plain text.

It's exactly the same for PS.

Just as you have to look at a text output of a unix command to figure out how to parse it and extract the subset of information you need from it, so do you have to look at the help metadata of a PS command to figure out how to extract the subset of information you need from its output.

The advantage of having objects instead of text is that if you thought you could parse the filename of grep matches by substring each line of `grep -H`'s output with `:`, you failed to account for filenames with colons. With PS's sls, its help metadata tells you it outputs `Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.MatchInfo` objects, and the documentation for that type tells you it has a `Filename` property of type string.

One PS command is not "integrated" with another PS command; they're all integrated to .Net and a bunch of built-in PS types.

Thanks for your answer, and I see where you are coming from. But your unix is not the same as my unix. For me, unix means programs that can be easily written using only the getchar and putchar functions. If you have "types" and whatnot, it's not unix.

It's not often you hear someone criticise a tool for not having enough unnecessary encoding and parsing steps involved.

Are you talking about people who promote JSON-RPC and whatnot? Sure, they are nuts, but what does it have to do with unix?

Funny enough given the linked post - Powershell owes it philosophy to VMS as well, e.g. the verb-noun command structure.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/powershell/verb-noun-vs-noun-...

https://ilovepowershell.com/2013/08/05/microsoft-virtual-aca...

Anecdote this jogged from my memory: my first Unix experience was NetBSD on a SEGA Dreamcast game console, of all things. This must have been some time in 2000 or 2001, but I remember sitting there trying every possible command I could think of trying to find one that did anything at all so i could keep going and learn more. The DOS commands I knew obviously didn’t do anything. Neither did anything like ‘help’ or ‘?’. After five minutes or so of trying commands off the top of my head I tried ‘exit’, and that was the end of my Unix experience until I mail ordered a Mandrake Linux CD-ROM set in 2002 :)

I also ordered one :) probably around 2003 - came with printed user guide

Whilst you have to know it to be able to use it, man -k THING will let you search for a manual, today. (--apropos if long options are supported, which isn't exactly clearer.)

You should try 9front (Plan9) it's kind of the evolution of the Unix philosophy.

http://9front.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

And afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like.

http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html

http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/

> which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like

No, not really can you proof that in any way?

Yes, really.

It was developed by the same core team that created Plan 9, and Limbo is the evolution of Alef, that Rob Pike wasn't happy to have to drop for Plan 9 3rd edition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)

> Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.[1][2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language;[3]...

> The Limbo programming language can be considered a direct successor of Alef and is the most commonly used language in the Inferno operating system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

> Inferno was based on the experience gained with Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and the further research of Bell Labs into operating systems, languages, on-the-fly compilers, graphics, security, networking and portability.

For some strange reason many stop at the middle station, instead of going all the way to the end.

I tend to share your thinking on this, although at least one knowledgeable online-imaginary-friend vigorously disagrees with me.

I have looked but failed to find a VM image or even images of installable media to build one online. If you know of any, I would like to know -- and if you don't know of any, but have the skills, I think you could do a big service to the OS research community by making and sharing either install media or a VM or both.

The OS research community knows that it is located at http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html.

Ever heard of search engines?

One of my favorite features of plan9 is how it handles the bin directory.

For one, you can have sub-directories inside the bin directory. This lends to a nice hierarchy of commands and encourages writing small single purpose commands instead of large monolith commands. An example of this is the `ip/ping` command.

Another feature uses the union file system which prevents me from having to mess with $PATH locating commands.

"man -k" (or "apropos") will let you search for commands. It is pretty primitive though, definitely not a Google quality search.

Read a blog, book or cheatsheet? Once you know the command it's much easier to remember (and explain) than click here, then there, then double click that, etc

man -k

apropos

Are 2 options

apropos

man -k "key words of the thing i'm searching for"

^^ also works fine ..

Finding man, cold from a prompt, is hard. If you type help, even today, you might get the shell one which doesn't take you there. Ditto info.

Oops, looks like Bash at least accounted for this case. Really, I think you want to route new user to "man intro" first, if they just asked for help.

    $ help
    GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
    These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
    Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
    Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
    Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.

Current macOS (Catalina with zsh):

   (base) user@myMachine ~ % help
   zsh: command not found: help

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