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I have a file called “Unix commands” that’s unofficially 25 years old and Google logs it at 9 years old. Every time I spend over five minutes on a command (on any OS, the file is misnamed) I add it to this log.

I’ve talked with others and some people have their own. But I’m curious how many people keep this personal “Swiss file knife.”

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Oh I'm actually just learning unix/how to work properly in the Command line and building this personal source of knowledge up and am wondering if you'd be down to share/point me to places that are good resources (beyond, of course, the man pages)

also the tool discussed here is available via scoop for windows if we're trying it out

Comically my favorite reference is a paper fold out cheat sheet I got 30 years ago. I’d link you to the company but it’s in my office gathering dust for the past year. I could find it through googling and don’t want to point you to one I don’t know about.

Beyond man, I use a very inefficient system of googling “man ls” (or whatever) and using the example sites, and end up using Linux.die.net [0] the most and find it easier to use than the actual man command.

And I found ESR’s guides [1] really helpful for understanding just how stuff works.

I’m sure I would drive a proper Unix user/sysadmin fits, but I just never am root and always have a backup to restore when I break stuff. So it’s hard for me to really break something.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch10s05.html

I wonder if shells history could have an option for this. Typing 90% levenstein distance commands just a few too many time as a signal ordered by freq.

You'd get logs of what you struggle on or do very often.

If I was smarter I could probably use that. I tried it in the beginning and was just basically keeping an infinite history by catting the history from my old machines into my new.

But then I started doing stuff outside of shell (windows, code snippets, jq and path snippets, etc) and it was getting to be a pain to grep through such a big file. So I applied the 5 minute rule and tried to rely on my laziness as an editor.

Also, while my file isn’t public I don’t keep anything sensitive or that would bother any past, present, or future employers and collaborators so sanitizing the shell history was starting to take time and make me worry that I might miss something.

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