A command-line murder mystery (2014) | Hacker News Reader

A command-line murder mystery (2014)

github.com

137 pointssmartmic19 comments

Forget everything you learned in school, rookie. Your real training begins today. You want to use your fancy coreutils and crack this case the glamorous way, or do you want to make your arrest quota for the month and keep your job?

  $ grep -ir confess interviews/

And if that doesn’t work:

  $ echo “I, John Doe of $address, of sound state of mind confess to the killing of…” >interviews/interview-$RANDOM

Take him away, boys!

A command-line murder mystery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20834466 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)

The Command Line Murders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994885 - Jan 2016 (60 comments)

A command-line murder mystery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7054598 - Jan 2014 (47 comments)

Also <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994885> (60 comments, 2016), via URL rather than title search.

Added. Thanks!

See also perhaps the git commit murder Series by Michael Warren Lucas:

* https://www.goodreads.com/series/321508-git-commit-murder

* https://mwl.io/fiction/crime#gcm

* https://mwl.io/fiction

The VisiData developers created a fun multi-part data wrangling puzzle last year called the Hanukkah of Data [1].

It is not specific to any tool, so you can use command line tools, the TUI data explorer VisiData[2] or whatever data tools you want to solve the puzzle in your terminal.

[1] https://hanukkah.bluebird.sh/5783/ [2] https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

I have a teenage son that is thinking about becoming a programmer. I've been teaching him some things like the command line, git, etc. Would someone with just a starting familiarity with the command line be able to play the game?

cat, head, tail, piping and lots of grep is enough to solve the mystery. It might require reading --help pages though if he is not familiar with some of the options of these commands, which would be quite educational anyway.

So I'd say go for it!

The included cheatsheet includes a fair bit and all the recommended tools you'd need to solve the mystery.

Command-line murder mystery is just every segmentation fault

That's more like a visit from jack the ripper. Not a shred of evidence left behind.

Wait til ol' Jack get's tripped up by core.

Typing

vim

is like deciding to explore the tunnels under the city. A very fascinating and useful experience, but you may have a little trouble exiting.

That was fun. Very reminiscent of sys admin bug hunting/maintenance.

I do wish they cleaned up the input. Not nice opening one of the files and seeing a racial slur.

Has anyone played this? I love mystery board games and this seems pretty fun.

I've been playing it for 20 minutes. It's fun so far.

Just solved the mystery. It was quite fun.

Sounds fun having to do it in a terminal.

sql version: https://github.com/NUKnightLab/sql-mysteries

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