Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

themodelplumber

Geez, it sounds like a really good bonding activity and discussion format they've got going there. I'd be excited too.

My son once asked me as I was walking down the hall, "dad, how do I install Steam?" I walked in his room and he had a very prominently placed terminal open, where I saw that he was typing "sudo apt install steam". I practically core dumped in shock. "Whoa buddy! Wow!" and of course that's what he was going for, since he has the affinity-vibe concept absolutely locked down and has had this gift ever since birth as far as I can tell.

Half or even most of that typing was just to synchronize with dad's values and build affinity. I respect it and I also, knowing that it's not _exactly_ 100% terminal love, don't push the terminal too hard unless it's related to a specific goal of his.

Meanwhile my other kids get up and leave for a snack as soon as I open the terminal on their desktops (it saves me time, they get that). But they are on the other hand really good at introducing COTS thinking into our household. :-) Sometimes you gotta go with the social tech bell curve. Just go buy the thing that does what you want! Duh! And I agree, you can define this as rationality itself in fact. Tinkering, scripting...irrational in some ways for sure, so good thing we have other ways of discussing its value.

Speaking of uh, typing, I was just today remembering one of the most scary experiences my kids and I have ever had, playing this roguelike game together...

http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/AliensRL

> sudo apt install steam

Kudos to the parent for teaching them the modern form; I still see people using apt-get for no reason.

Same reason people keep using cat or dd, just habit and millions of old docs google has enshrined telling them to.

why would you stop using cat or dd? I use cat everyday, what am I supposed to replace it with?

what replaces dd?

cat isn’t as good as less for displaying a file. I still have the habit of using cat though, even for large files.

I'm pretty sure cat is still the best option for 99% of all shell scripts that need to read a file and do something with it.

shellcheck gets uppity about that. It's like "'toolname < textfile' plz"

https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2002

Wow, I've written way more shell code than people should and I didn't know you could write this

  toolname < textfile

as

  < textfile toolname

My theory is that it's because most people using Bash are not interested in it per se (in the way, say, many C programmers are interested in its intrinsics) but in solving a problem, and Bash can let you solve it in several different ways. So you solve the problem and maybe don't use Bash for a few days and then again you need to solve another problem, maybe completely different. Personally I rediscover certain aspects of Bash every few years just because of that. I'm not going to read the whole Bash manual from the beginning till the end in the same way I read K&R because it makes no sense - I can solve my problem in 2 minutes and get on with my main work.

You say that, but the bash manual is an absolute delight. (unironically).

Super clear, comprehensive but straight to the point, everything you might want to know is there in logical headings.

I struggled with bad bash code I'd pick up on websites and online tutorials, until I decided to just do `man bash` one day. Went from 10% to 99.999% bash proficient overnight.

Whenever I need to check something related to bash these days, 99% of the time the man page resolves my query within seconds. Occasionally you have to do `help [TAB]` and get the help for the specific built in instead. The bits not covered by the above two points are extremely rare.

not me. I use tac | tac instead.

TBH I think there was a time period during which my distro's terminal env would explain in so many words--"using `apt-get` is now such a fail," or some friendly nudge like that, and that's where I picked up the new form.

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