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Never heard of the dict command? The author went through the trouble of figuring out the protocol but never bothered to just run dict. Okay.
by bubblesnort 2y ago
Never heard of the dict command?
The author went through the trouble of figuring out the protocol but never bothered to just run dict. Okay.
- jmillikin 2y agoWhat do you think the post would have contained if he had run dict? Here's a hint: macbook% dict zsh: command not found: dict desktop$ dict bash: dict: command not found You'd have to be pretty into retro-computing before you'll find an OS that ships /usr/bin/dict .
- politelemon 2y agoNot really... FWIW, addressing the 'hint' you're giving specifically, this is on Ubuntu. $ dict Command 'dict' not found, but can be installed with: sudo apt install dict After installing, $ dict example 6 definitions found ...
- jmillikin 2y agoSo the causal chain would be: 1. Notice a URL scheme dict:// 2. Try to type 'dict' into a terminal, on the off chance there's a command-line tool with the same name (would you do this for https:// https:// and expect the same outcome?) 3. Be running a distribution that modifies the user's shell environment to suggest packages related to unknown commands 4. Actually install and run that command 5. Be running tcpdump or wireshark at the same time to notice that the `dict` command is reaching out to the network, as opposed to doing some sort of local lookup in /usr/share/dict 6. Figure out from the network traffic that the tool is using a dictionary-specific protocol as opposed to just making an HTTP request to dictionary.com or whatever. -- Nah, the only way someone would know (or even suspect!) that dict:// is somehow related to an ancient Unix command-line tool is prior knowledge, and it's unreasonable to expect the article author to have somehow intuited such an idea.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kragen 2y agoright, the causal chain would be that the author already used the dict command and had at some point read the man page, which begins DICT(1) DICT(1) NAME dict - DICT Protocol Client SYNOPSIS (...) DESCRIPTION dict is a client for the Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT), (...) but, yeah, not everybody has that background which is fine! nobody is born knowing all the unix commands
- bubblesnort 2y agoHTTP is the weird protocol here. Lots of protocols were named after the program (or vice versa). finger, ftp, ssh, talk, telnet, tftp, maybe whois too?
- kragen 2y agoalso gopher. mail and dns are two other exceptions tho
- forbiddenlake 2y agoThe point of the article wasn't how to define a word, it was answering why old code mentioned the dict protocol in the same regex as http and ftp. I for one had never heard of the dict:// protocol, so I was curious about it.
- akho 2y agoThis is not old code. Old code did not have dialer (tel:) urls. Given the timing, the dict it refers to is also not the original one, but the Safari link scheme.
- ludwik 2y agoThis is a fun post about an obscure internet protocol, not a how-to.
- hnlmorg 2y agoThe “dict” string was included in a regex of protocols. So they wanted to learn more about the protocol. It’s entirely possible they were already aware of other software that supports dictionary lookups.