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"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
by lalalandland 6y ago
"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
- mozey 6y agoRead 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
- shakna 6y agoWhilst 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.)
- throwaway2048 6y agoapropos
- somesortofsystm 6y agoman -k "key words of the thing i'm searching for" ^^ also works fine ..
- imglorp 6y agoFinding 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.
- imglorp 6y agoOops, 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.
- FabHK 6y agoCurrent macOS (Catalina with zsh): (base) user@myMachine ~ % help zsh: command not found: help
- nix23 6y agoYou should try 9front (Plan9) it's kind of the evolution of the Unix philosophy. http://9front.org/ http://9front.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
- pjmlp 6y agoAnd afterwards try Inferno, which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like. http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html http://inferno-os.org/inferno/limbo.html http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/
- nix23 6y ago> which is what Plan 9 wanted to actually be like No, not really can you proof that in any way?
- pjmlp 6y agoYes, 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) 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) 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.
- lproven 6y agoI 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.
- webreac 6y agoI 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).
- arethuza 6y agoI 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.
- rswail 6y agoA 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#end https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tunefs&sektion=8#e...
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoThe 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 :)
- a1369209993 6y ago> "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.
- C1sc0cat 6y agoDEC documentation was always very good but then it was a product you paid for.
- rswail 6y agoLots of people paid lots of money to DEC and Sun and HP and IBM and others for Unix as well.
- Lammy 6y agoAnecdote 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 :)
- noisy_boy 6y agoI also ordered one :) probably around 2003 - came with printed user guide
- jiggawatts 6y agoPowerShell takes the UNIX philosophy, cranks it up to 11, and makes commands trivially discoverable.
- enriquto 6y agoNo, it doesn't. Get out.
- majkinetor 6y agoYes it does. Learn it before commenting. Furthermore, its definitely way more unixy then any *nix shells.
- andi999 6y agoHow to discover commands?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoPowershell 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.
- majkinetor 6y ago> 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.
- zaphirplane 6y agoman -k apropos Are 2 options
- icedchai 6y ago"man -k" (or "apropos") will let you search for commands. It is pretty primitive though, definitely not a Google quality search.