10 ms·

Twelve Days of Shell

258 points by zoidb 10mo ago

dncornholio 10mo ago
Terrible. You cannot 'ls' if ls is not the right answer. Completely useless.
- imp0cat 10mo ago
  That's not true. You can absolutely use ls and other commands to poke around before creating the winning command.
Barathkanna 10mo ago
Fun idea. It’s basically an Advent calendar for shell one-liners. Nice way to level up your CLI muscles without diving into full projects.
- jll29 10mo ago
  Neat. Perhaps it would be even nicer if the "advent" theme was more prominently present, e.g. using the Bible as the target data file to be used. Here's three examples tasks from me: (1) Write an sh script (using only POSIX standard commands) to create a Keywords in Context (KWIC) concordance of the new testament. (2) Write a bash script that uses grep with regular expressions to extracts all literal quotes of what Jesus said in the New Testament. [Incidentally, doing this task manually marked the beginnings of philology and later automating it marked the beginning of what was later called literary and linguistic computing, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and digital humanities.] (3) How many times is Jesus mentioned by each of the four accounts of his life (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)? (You may begin by extracting the New Testament from the end of the Bible with a grep command.) Dataset: https://openbible.com/textfiles/kjv.txt https://openbible.com/textfiles/kjv.txt
  - chrisweekly 10mo ago
    Respectfully, many would find that off-putting. "Advent of X" in tech is entirely decoupled from religion. Keeping it neutral seems to me the "nicest" approach. That said, something like what you described might be a cool exercise for your bible study group. Finally, I appreciated your "incidentally" aside about the origins of philology.
    - lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
      I'll preface this by saying I was never especially bothered or moved by the non-religious use of "Advent of X", for better or for worse. In fact, my remark is inspired only by your comment, concerning its consistency and who has the stronger case. Specifically, while it is true that certain kinds of words can become decoupled from their original meanings (which is generally normal), in this case, the usage is not so decoupled, especially given that this usage occurs during the religious season of Advent and with the intentional allusion to the religious season of Advent. (Otherwise, what is "Advent of X" without its religious origin and which takes place at the exact same time during the year?) You can make a much stronger argument that the non-religious usage is a kind of cultural appropriation. That would make your concern entirely backwards. Your wish is to keep it "neutral" to please those who don't practice Advent, as you show a simultaneous lack of concern for the tradition it appropriates from. This involves a tacit claim of possessing the authority to do so as well, but if anything, given the source, if anything, the authority belongs not to the appropriators, but to the Church. One wonders how a "Ramadan of Code" or "Teshuvah of Shell" would be received. "Neutrality" is, of course, a bunk concept, and the idea that we ought to be guided by what is "nice" rather than what is "good" is a grave misunderstanding of how decisions ought to be made.
      - chrisweekly 10mo ago
        Thanks for the response. I don't intend to get into a protracted debate here, but would like to point out that the winter solstice holiday we call "Christmas" was itself appropriated from various traditions, esp. "Saturnalia" as practiced by the Romans. In modern times, countless non-religious homes in the US feature "advent calendars", with tiny treats hidden behind numbered doors. They -- like santa, elves, gift-giving, and "christmas" trees -- have nothing to do with Christian orthodoxy. By all means, you should do what you think is "good". That's what I strive to do. My comment about "nice" was literally quoting you, so in trying to take me to task for that, as with your broader point, you've missed the mark. I don't think your hypocrisy is intentional, but I do feel good about pointing it out. Have a nice day and holiday season! :)
arionmiles 10mo ago
I've recently reached a point where I feel I've reached an upper limit with how much efficiency I can extract from my usual toolset/editors. So I've gone on a journey where I'm finally exploring tools that make living in the command line a productive and pleasant experience for me. I've long put off learning or even exploring tmux or learning more than a few handful of vim keybinds. So I started digging into configuring them and learning them well enough to be able to regularly use them for work and personal computers. It's been very pleasant, to say the least. There's still a few ways I need to go where I do everything from the command line and the keyboard, but I think it's worth training your muscles to be comfortable with doing things purely using the keyboard. I've switched to vim mode for a few tools that offer it. I started seriously using vimium on chrome and firefox (a friend had introduced me to it about 7 years ago but I never cared enough to learn it well). Another reason I finally made the jump was that I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions. While I've taken measures to improve ergonomic use of the mouse and keyboard, I'm just totally impressed with the capabilities of keyboard navigation and how much value you can extract out of your keyboard. My friends have been egging on me about the bell curve meme, but I think it's important for me to figure out the limits and then maybe I will finally go back to defaults and simpler tools. The only way to be on the right side of the bell curve is through the middle.
- torben-friis 10mo ago
  I went back and forth over the years with vim. Lazyvim plus the ebook (lazyvim for ambitious devs or something like that, it’s free online) is what allowed me to stick. I can’t be doing real work and suddenly realize I don’t know the way to do a certain basic action. Lazyvim makes it so that for everything you want to do, there’s an already configured way, and then you have all the time in the world to fiddle for a better alternative if you don’t like it.
- kalaksi 10mo ago
  For learning vim, I recommend searching for a "vim cheat sheet" that has an image of a keyboard layout with vim commands in it and printing that. Makes it easier to check and learn more, little by little. Another one is online tutorials that make you practice interactively. Haven't used those much but the little I did, it was helpful.
pstoll 10mo ago
Neat idea à la regex golf. But doesn’t seem to do enough shell escaping or correctly. Also seems underspecified, ie “find 5 lines starting with ‘the” doesn’t require a pipe to head -5.
- oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
  > find 5 lines Especially since the previous two questions used head/tail. IMO, the wording would be better as "find all the lines" since that's what the command does.
aargh_aargh 10mo ago
The good: Nice exercises for beginners. Tab-completion, accepts readline characters like ctrl-u. The bad: You don't see the (wrong) output if you don't get it right the first time, making it hard to work iteratively and having to guess what the question actually intended. E.g. 'Seven files that start with "Santa"' actually wants file names that start with Santa, after some questions that had you use "grep" to search file contents. Where I actually struggled with what's expected is Day 11. The ugly: Actually a very nice design.
- Retr0id 10mo ago
  The tab completion sorta works but it seems to be simulated, doesn't understand subdirectories etc.
- pekim 10mo ago
  > Where I actually struggled with what's expected is Day 11. Just the lines from the files are wanted, not the files names. It took me a little while to cotton on to that. Semi-spoiler follows. So you need to use the appropriate flag with grep to suppress the file names.
bluecalm 10mo ago
It looks very nice. One problem I've encountered is that when you make a mistake then the name of the file you have to use disappears and it's impossible to get it back. What is this website created with btw? I like the style a lot.
skinwill 10mo ago
Viewing the page with Safari 26.1 the questions stopped showing up after the second challenge. I was left with only Learn and View Solutions, which was not very fun since both showed a form of the answer. TL;DR: The page stopped loading properly.
- Milpotel 10mo ago
  > Safari [..] The page stopped loading properly. Who would've guessed...
franticgecko3 10mo ago
Tab complete is completely broken on Firefox mobile (Android)
derrida 10mo ago
Hey this doesn’t work : first solution “ls -al” which I use all the time to list directories was rejected in the second question I used awk and was rejected it expected grep I think a beginner could be doing it right but then be told they are wrong as you aren’t evaluating actual commands Best would be to like actually run it* and then check solutions out with awk that it pattern matches * aka give me a shell ok worth a try lol xD Edit: also I was expecting something a bit more challenging (also that is correct) to like exercise the brain for those of us that use shell (this is hacker news) something that takes a few minutes and isn’t just commands used all the time
- comprev 10mo ago
  "ls" shows only visible files whereas "ls -a" also displays those starting with a dot. Given the question doesn't that make your answer the correct one?
  - derrida 10mo ago
    It accepts ls -a as and answer and ls -l but not ls -al
  - zenoprax 10mo ago
    `la -A` will also show hidden files but excludes the "." and ".." I prefer that way in theory but a capital "A" is not as quick/easy to type.
- Retr0id 10mo ago
  It does seem to actually run the submitted commands, and awk is there.
  - derrida 10mo ago
    Second question > awk '/^laugh/ { print $0 }' night-before-christmas.txt
    - aidenn0 10mo ago
benterix 10mo ago
It would be nice if the instructions spelled out what to do, then I could do it. Otherwise I have to guess what author meant. But all in, a nice small exercise, thanks!
beardyw 10mo ago
As a developer I've been through 10 different languages and about the same number of operating systems, and I barely managed to remember any of them, even at the time. And I assume soon using natural language as the main interface will become commonplace, which will finally let me off the hook. I will give this a go, but I doubt any of it will stick!
- k_bx 10mo ago
  Shell quotes is the last frontier LLM's seem to keep getting wrong. Esp when it's Github CI yaml which needs to ssh somewhere and run command running another command there. Needs AGI apparrently.
  - wpm 10mo ago
    That and giving me GNU awk/grep/sed shit when I specifically asked for macOS/BSD.
janmatejka 10mo ago
'Seven files that start with Santa' is actually about filenames. That's pretty confusing especially since users are primed with file contents from the previous exercises already. And from pipers piping description I had no idea what was wanted of me.
- Kakist0crat 10mo ago
  I think that may be the point, the subtlety of "lines of pipers piping" got me for a second - as opposed to the 11 pipers piping files (which is what I thought it wanted).
ParadisoShlee 10mo ago
I assumed this was some kind of hacking challenge.
oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
I think the instructions need more detail. 'Five lines that start with "the"' doesn't scream 'or "The", or "thE"' to me...
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- hdjrudni 10mo ago
  Yeah, I was very confused why it wasn't accepting my grep at first.
sva_ 10mo ago
Cool idea but very opinionated and no room for variation
sannysanoff 10mo ago
Fluent in shell, but cultural context is more difficult, especially with pipers, had to do guess work.
- ggirelli 10mo ago
  I think that's part of the fun :)
blenderob 10mo ago
Looks nice but it's rejecting valid commands as incorrect. Like when it told me to search for "laugh" I ran grep laugh * There's only one file in the directory. So that's a correct answer but the game wants me to run grep laugh night-before-christmas.txt It's like those weird interviewers who have a specific answer in mind and they'll accept nothing other than the answer they have in mind.
- ggirelli 10mo ago
  Or cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep laugh
- charlie-83 10mo ago
  `grep laugh *` worked for me
  - blenderob 10mo ago
    I tried again to see if they fixed it. No it still doesn't work. You'll get the output but look closer. Output does not match expected lines - try again So you can't move on to the next level.
    - szszrk 10mo ago
      they must have fixed it. Works for me, including new sessions on separate browser.
      - blenderob 10mo ago
        Still doesn't work for me in a new session separate browser. I get the output but I also get this message Output does not match expected lines - try again Does it give you the clue for the next level? Can you or someone else share a screenshot or something so I can compare to find out what I'm missing?
        szszrk 10mo ago
haolez 10mo ago
The way that worked for me to properly learn shell is to do a non-shell project with it. Like, do a complex background worker for a web server that listens to a socket, does complicated stuff, exports functions (if in Bash), etc. You don't have to use it afterwards. The value is in the journey. It's fun :)
FailMore 10mo ago
How would one make a true shell in a website like this one? (As in, is there an open source library to host an interactive shell for educational purposes - eg codecademy)
- ctippett 10mo ago
  I couldn't tell you the exact details (I'm only passingly familiar with how it works myself), but you'd almost certainly want to start by looking into web assembly. I found a-Shell's documentation[1] quite interesting, it describes their use of web assembly and offers some practical tips for compiling stuff so it can work in a sandboxed environment. [1]: https://bianshen00009.gitbook.io/a-guide-to-a-shell/lets-do-more-for-it/webassembly-for-a-shell https://bianshen00009.gitbook.io/a-guide-to-a-shell/lets-do-...
bArray 10mo ago
Great idea, but a few feedback points: 1. It's difficult to know that it is following from the previous problem, and then on some problems it changes the workspace. 2. It's not always easy to know what it wants. 3. The question about finding a line starting with "The" I successfully cheated: cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep "The " 4. Likewise the ending "!": cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep "!" 5. On the eighth day I get a "runner error" with the command: mv *lve* Workshop I'm globbing for the filename match, I'm not sure if it's "elve" or "Elve" and then trying to move to the target directory. Otherwise it's quite fun - the instant feedback is great.
- iN7h33nD 10mo ago
  iirc Elves is a directory with them inside.
throw0101d 10mo ago
Meta: the first day of the Twelve Days of Christmas is Christmas Day (December 25) itself: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas The days before the 25th are part of the season of Advent: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent
- xnorswap 10mo ago
  Too many people I know spend their boxing day packing up their tree. Christmas is over before it's barely begun! But that's kind of understandable when Christmas begins in September if you believe the retailers.
  - throw0101d 10mo ago
    > boxing day Ah, a fellow Commonwealther (I'm Canadian): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Nations
  - lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
    Indeed. Christmas lasts until Epiphany (January 6th) or even Candlemas (February 2nd). Commercialism is likely the culprit for the current state of affairs. By putting the "Christmas season" and the commercialized variety of festivity before Christmas and making Christmas day the big finale, you create a situation during which you can get people to buy, buy, buy. And then it's over. Compare that with the real deal and as it was traditionally celebrated. Advent is a period of contemplation, waiting, quiet, abstinence from meat -maybe even fasting - in anticipation for the birth of Christ. Then, on Christmas Eve and especially Christmas day, the festivities kick off, and they last until January 6th (the 12 days of Christmas) or Candlemas (40 days of Christmas). And that's when people used to pack up their trees and decorations (either Jan 6th or Feb 2nd). People today suck at festivity. We're boring.
    - OkayPhysicist 10mo ago
einpoklum 10mo ago
I tried to grep for "♫ piping ♫" at some point and the website got stuck. I wonder what it was trying to do... other than that - nice exercise for newbie shell dabblers :-)
Biganon 10mo ago
I mean if you ask for the lines that start with "the" and expect lines that start with "The", maybe you should say it in the instructions. After the 3rd time I had to peek at "learn" to understand what was even asked, I gave up. This is more annoying than fun.
smusamashah 10mo ago
That font is not very easy to read quickly.
cornonthecobra 10mo ago
It doesn't handle backspace correctly. The character is erased visually, but not removed from the buffer, so when you type the next character, the erased character reappears. Make one typo and you have to reload the page.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 10mo ago
"Try sending the command ls in the command box to list all files in the directory." My answer: `ls -a` er, wrong. Then don't put all in the question!
mejthemage 10mo ago
I would love something like this that puts me in my own shell. Like a light CTF that is really just shell commands rather than breaking into a VM
- mejthemage 10mo ago
  I went searching and realized overthewire has a bash specific course called "Bandit". Still a VM you SSH to
lozf 10mo ago
If you like things like this you'll probably enjoy b64(r13(MaE3o3OmYz5yqPNtqUu0VPOxnJpX))
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
ilvez 10mo ago
Constantly hit Ctrl-w and close the tab. Ctrl-Shift-Tab to get back to it :-) God bless saved state, otherwise I would not have completed :D
lcuff 10mo ago
I thought there was too much ambiguity to several of the challenges: I gave up after the following exercise: On the eighth day of Shell my true love gave to me Eight elves in Santa's Workhop/ ... Hint: Try finding files named after Elves and moving them to the Workshop/ directory. It turns out, all they want is the files in the ./Elves directory to the ./Workshop directory. But I didn't figure that out.
- imp0cat 10mo ago
  You're overthinking it. You can get quite far with a bit of ls or find . -type f exploration
  - lcuff 10mo ago
    Failing to understand the basic requirement is not, IMHO, overthinking it. I will admit, as I reread the question and the hint just now, that I just didn't read carefully the first time through. It's actually pretty clear. Sigh. People's minds work quite differently ... As evidenced by people that have strong reactions to particular languages (love or hate), or, as another example, people that love or hate syntax coloring in code. (Yes, it gets in the way for some). The fact that the instructions didn't make the problem clear to me is not an overthinking problem on my part. It would be better for me if the problems were expressed in different ways. When trying to communicate, saying the same thing two different ways is a big step towards helping deal with the variance in people's minds. I wish they'd done that with some of the questions.
entropie 10mo ago
I have serious issues reading that font
naikrovek 10mo ago
I use the shell all day every day and I got stopped at the SECOND question. "lines that contain 'laugh'". lines of what? Doesn't tell you without looking at the answer. genius.
chillfox 10mo ago
That's a nice little challenge. I did have some issues with Day 11 figuring out what it wanted, but overall it was fun.
kwar13 10mo ago
#11 was confusing as hell: this is what worked 'grep -R 'piping' ./place-for-pipers | cut -d: -f2-' only content no filenames. Need to see the output if it's wrong to baseline what's being asked.
tensility 10mo ago
Not giving real output is a complete fail. Try again.

258 points by zoidb 10mo ago

dncornholio 10mo ago

Terrible. You cannot 'ls' if ls is not the right answer. Completely useless.

imp0cat 10mo ago
That's not true. You can absolutely use ls and other commands to poke around before creating the winning command.

Barathkanna 10mo ago

Fun idea. It’s basically an Advent calendar for shell one-liners. Nice way to level up your CLI muscles without diving into full projects.

jll29 10mo ago
Neat. Perhaps it would be even nicer if the "advent" theme was more prominently present, e.g. using the Bible as the target data file to be used. Here's three examples tasks from me: (1) Write an sh script (using only POSIX standard commands) to create a Keywords in Context (KWIC) concordance of the new testament. (2) Write a bash script that uses grep with regular expressions to extracts all literal quotes of what Jesus said in the New Testament. [Incidentally, doing this task manually marked the beginnings of philology and later automating it marked the beginning of what was later called literary and linguistic computing, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and digital humanities.] (3) How many times is Jesus mentioned by each of the four accounts of his life (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)? (You may begin by extracting the New Testament from the end of the Bible with a grep command.) Dataset: https://openbible.com/textfiles/kjv.txt https://openbible.com/textfiles/kjv.txt
- chrisweekly 10mo ago
  Respectfully, many would find that off-putting. "Advent of X" in tech is entirely decoupled from religion. Keeping it neutral seems to me the "nicest" approach. That said, something like what you described might be a cool exercise for your bible study group. Finally, I appreciated your "incidentally" aside about the origins of philology.
  - lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
    I'll preface this by saying I was never especially bothered or moved by the non-religious use of "Advent of X", for better or for worse. In fact, my remark is inspired only by your comment, concerning its consistency and who has the stronger case. Specifically, while it is true that certain kinds of words can become decoupled from their original meanings (which is generally normal), in this case, the usage is not so decoupled, especially given that this usage occurs during the religious season of Advent and with the intentional allusion to the religious season of Advent. (Otherwise, what is "Advent of X" without its religious origin and which takes place at the exact same time during the year?) You can make a much stronger argument that the non-religious usage is a kind of cultural appropriation. That would make your concern entirely backwards. Your wish is to keep it "neutral" to please those who don't practice Advent, as you show a simultaneous lack of concern for the tradition it appropriates from. This involves a tacit claim of possessing the authority to do so as well, but if anything, given the source, if anything, the authority belongs not to the appropriators, but to the Church. One wonders how a "Ramadan of Code" or "Teshuvah of Shell" would be received. "Neutrality" is, of course, a bunk concept, and the idea that we ought to be guided by what is "nice" rather than what is "good" is a grave misunderstanding of how decisions ought to be made.
    - chrisweekly 10mo ago
      Thanks for the response. I don't intend to get into a protracted debate here, but would like to point out that the winter solstice holiday we call "Christmas" was itself appropriated from various traditions, esp. "Saturnalia" as practiced by the Romans. In modern times, countless non-religious homes in the US feature "advent calendars", with tiny treats hidden behind numbered doors. They -- like santa, elves, gift-giving, and "christmas" trees -- have nothing to do with Christian orthodoxy. By all means, you should do what you think is "good". That's what I strive to do. My comment about "nice" was literally quoting you, so in trying to take me to task for that, as with your broader point, you've missed the mark. I don't think your hypocrisy is intentional, but I do feel good about pointing it out. Have a nice day and holiday season! :)

arionmiles 10mo ago

I've recently reached a point where I feel I've reached an upper limit with how much efficiency I can extract from my usual toolset/editors. So I've gone on a journey where I'm finally exploring tools that make living in the command line a productive and pleasant experience for me. I've long put off learning or even exploring tmux or learning more than a few handful of vim keybinds. So I started digging into configuring them and learning them well enough to be able to regularly use them for work and personal computers. It's been very pleasant, to say the least. There's still a few ways I need to go where I do everything from the command line and the keyboard, but I think it's worth training your muscles to be comfortable with doing things purely using the keyboard. I've switched to vim mode for a few tools that offer it. I started seriously using vimium on chrome and firefox (a friend had introduced me to it about 7 years ago but I never cared enough to learn it well). Another reason I finally made the jump was that I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions. While I've taken measures to improve ergonomic use of the mouse and keyboard, I'm just totally impressed with the capabilities of keyboard navigation and how much value you can extract out of your keyboard. My friends have been egging on me about the bell curve meme, but I think it's important for me to figure out the limits and then maybe I will finally go back to defaults and simpler tools. The only way to be on the right side of the bell curve is through the middle.

torben-friis 10mo ago
I went back and forth over the years with vim. Lazyvim plus the ebook (lazyvim for ambitious devs or something like that, it’s free online) is what allowed me to stick. I can’t be doing real work and suddenly realize I don’t know the way to do a certain basic action. Lazyvim makes it so that for everything you want to do, there’s an already configured way, and then you have all the time in the world to fiddle for a better alternative if you don’t like it.
kalaksi 10mo ago
For learning vim, I recommend searching for a "vim cheat sheet" that has an image of a keyboard layout with vim commands in it and printing that. Makes it easier to check and learn more, little by little. Another one is online tutorials that make you practice interactively. Haven't used those much but the little I did, it was helpful.

pstoll 10mo ago

Neat idea à la regex golf. But doesn’t seem to do enough shell escaping or correctly. Also seems underspecified, ie “find 5 lines starting with ‘the” doesn’t require a pipe to head -5.

oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
> find 5 lines Especially since the previous two questions used head/tail. IMO, the wording would be better as "find all the lines" since that's what the command does.

aargh_aargh 10mo ago

The good: Nice exercises for beginners. Tab-completion, accepts readline characters like ctrl-u. The bad: You don't see the (wrong) output if you don't get it right the first time, making it hard to work iteratively and having to guess what the question actually intended. E.g. 'Seven files that start with "Santa"' actually wants file names that start with Santa, after some questions that had you use "grep" to search file contents. Where I actually struggled with what's expected is Day 11. The ugly: Actually a very nice design.

Retr0id 10mo ago
The tab completion sorta works but it seems to be simulated, doesn't understand subdirectories etc.
pekim 10mo ago
> Where I actually struggled with what's expected is Day 11. Just the lines from the files are wanted, not the files names. It took me a little while to cotton on to that. Semi-spoiler follows. So you need to use the appropriate flag with grep to suppress the file names.

bluecalm 10mo ago

It looks very nice. One problem I've encountered is that when you make a mistake then the name of the file you have to use disappears and it's impossible to get it back. What is this website created with btw? I like the style a lot.

skinwill 10mo ago

Viewing the page with Safari 26.1 the questions stopped showing up after the second challenge. I was left with only Learn and View Solutions, which was not very fun since both showed a form of the answer. TL;DR: The page stopped loading properly.

Milpotel 10mo ago
> Safari [..] The page stopped loading properly. Who would've guessed...

franticgecko3 10mo ago

Tab complete is completely broken on Firefox mobile (Android)

derrida 10mo ago

Hey this doesn’t work : first solution “ls -al” which I use all the time to list directories was rejected in the second question I used awk and was rejected it expected grep I think a beginner could be doing it right but then be told they are wrong as you aren’t evaluating actual commands Best would be to like actually run it* and then check solutions out with awk that it pattern matches * aka give me a shell ok worth a try lol xD Edit: also I was expecting something a bit more challenging (also that is correct) to like exercise the brain for those of us that use shell (this is hacker news) something that takes a few minutes and isn’t just commands used all the time

comprev 10mo ago
"ls" shows only visible files whereas "ls -a" also displays those starting with a dot. Given the question doesn't that make your answer the correct one?
- derrida 10mo ago
  It accepts ls -a as and answer and ls -l but not ls -al
- zenoprax 10mo ago
  `la -A` will also show hidden files but excludes the "." and ".." I prefer that way in theory but a capital "A" is not as quick/easy to type.
Retr0id 10mo ago
It does seem to actually run the submitted commands, and awk is there.
- derrida 10mo ago
  Second question > awk '/^laugh/ { print $0 }' night-before-christmas.txt
  - aidenn0 10mo ago

benterix 10mo ago

It would be nice if the instructions spelled out what to do, then I could do it. Otherwise I have to guess what author meant. But all in, a nice small exercise, thanks!

beardyw 10mo ago

As a developer I've been through 10 different languages and about the same number of operating systems, and I barely managed to remember any of them, even at the time. And I assume soon using natural language as the main interface will become commonplace, which will finally let me off the hook. I will give this a go, but I doubt any of it will stick!

k_bx 10mo ago
Shell quotes is the last frontier LLM's seem to keep getting wrong. Esp when it's Github CI yaml which needs to ssh somewhere and run command running another command there. Needs AGI apparrently.
- wpm 10mo ago
  That and giving me GNU awk/grep/sed shit when I specifically asked for macOS/BSD.

janmatejka 10mo ago

'Seven files that start with Santa' is actually about filenames. That's pretty confusing especially since users are primed with file contents from the previous exercises already. And from pipers piping description I had no idea what was wanted of me.

Kakist0crat 10mo ago
I think that may be the point, the subtlety of "lines of pipers piping" got me for a second - as opposed to the 11 pipers piping files (which is what I thought it wanted).

ParadisoShlee 10mo ago

I assumed this was some kind of hacking challenge.

oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago

I think the instructions need more detail. 'Five lines that start with "the"' doesn't scream 'or "The", or "thE"' to me...

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
hdjrudni 10mo ago
Yeah, I was very confused why it wasn't accepting my grep at first.

sva_ 10mo ago

Cool idea but very opinionated and no room for variation

sannysanoff 10mo ago

Fluent in shell, but cultural context is more difficult, especially with pipers, had to do guess work.

ggirelli 10mo ago
I think that's part of the fun :)

blenderob 10mo ago

Looks nice but it's rejecting valid commands as incorrect. Like when it told me to search for "laugh" I ran grep laugh * There's only one file in the directory. So that's a correct answer but the game wants me to run grep laugh night-before-christmas.txt It's like those weird interviewers who have a specific answer in mind and they'll accept nothing other than the answer they have in mind.

ggirelli 10mo ago
Or cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep laugh
charlie-83 10mo ago
`grep laugh *` worked for me
- blenderob 10mo ago
  I tried again to see if they fixed it. No it still doesn't work. You'll get the output but look closer. Output does not match expected lines - try again So you can't move on to the next level.
  - szszrk 10mo ago
    they must have fixed it. Works for me, including new sessions on separate browser.
    - blenderob 10mo ago
      Still doesn't work for me in a new session separate browser. I get the output but I also get this message Output does not match expected lines - try again Does it give you the clue for the next level? Can you or someone else share a screenshot or something so I can compare to find out what I'm missing?
      - szszrk 10mo ago

haolez 10mo ago

The way that worked for me to properly learn shell is to do a non-shell project with it. Like, do a complex background worker for a web server that listens to a socket, does complicated stuff, exports functions (if in Bash), etc. You don't have to use it afterwards. The value is in the journey. It's fun :)

FailMore 10mo ago

How would one make a true shell in a website like this one? (As in, is there an open source library to host an interactive shell for educational purposes - eg codecademy)

ctippett 10mo ago
I couldn't tell you the exact details (I'm only passingly familiar with how it works myself), but you'd almost certainly want to start by looking into web assembly. I found a-Shell's documentation[1] quite interesting, it describes their use of web assembly and offers some practical tips for compiling stuff so it can work in a sandboxed environment. [1]: https://bianshen00009.gitbook.io/a-guide-to-a-shell/lets-do-more-for-it/webassembly-for-a-shell https://bianshen00009.gitbook.io/a-guide-to-a-shell/lets-do-...

bArray 10mo ago

Great idea, but a few feedback points: 1. It's difficult to know that it is following from the previous problem, and then on some problems it changes the workspace. 2. It's not always easy to know what it wants. 3. The question about finding a line starting with "The" I successfully cheated: cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep "The " 4. Likewise the ending "!": cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep "!" 5. On the eighth day I get a "runner error" with the command: mv *lve* Workshop I'm globbing for the filename match, I'm not sure if it's "elve" or "Elve" and then trying to move to the target directory. Otherwise it's quite fun - the instant feedback is great.

iN7h33nD 10mo ago
iirc Elves is a directory with them inside.

throw0101d 10mo ago

Meta: the first day of the Twelve Days of Christmas is Christmas Day (December 25) itself: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas The days before the 25th are part of the season of Advent: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent

xnorswap 10mo ago
Too many people I know spend their boxing day packing up their tree. Christmas is over before it's barely begun! But that's kind of understandable when Christmas begins in September if you believe the retailers.
- throw0101d 10mo ago
  > boxing day Ah, a fellow Commonwealther (I'm Canadian): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxing_Day * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Nations
- lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
  Indeed. Christmas lasts until Epiphany (January 6th) or even Candlemas (February 2nd). Commercialism is likely the culprit for the current state of affairs. By putting the "Christmas season" and the commercialized variety of festivity before Christmas and making Christmas day the big finale, you create a situation during which you can get people to buy, buy, buy. And then it's over. Compare that with the real deal and as it was traditionally celebrated. Advent is a period of contemplation, waiting, quiet, abstinence from meat -maybe even fasting - in anticipation for the birth of Christ. Then, on Christmas Eve and especially Christmas day, the festivities kick off, and they last until January 6th (the 12 days of Christmas) or Candlemas (40 days of Christmas). And that's when people used to pack up their trees and decorations (either Jan 6th or Feb 2nd). People today suck at festivity. We're boring.
  - OkayPhysicist 10mo ago

einpoklum 10mo ago

I tried to grep for "♫ piping ♫" at some point and the website got stuck. I wonder what it was trying to do... other than that - nice exercise for newbie shell dabblers :-)

Biganon 10mo ago

I mean if you ask for the lines that start with "the" and expect lines that start with "The", maybe you should say it in the instructions. After the 3rd time I had to peek at "learn" to understand what was even asked, I gave up. This is more annoying than fun.

smusamashah 10mo ago

That font is not very easy to read quickly.

cornonthecobra 10mo ago

It doesn't handle backspace correctly. The character is erased visually, but not removed from the buffer, so when you type the next character, the erased character reappears. Make one typo and you have to reload the page.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 10mo ago

"Try sending the command ls in the command box to list all files in the directory." My answer: `ls -a` er, wrong. Then don't put all in the question!

mejthemage 10mo ago

I would love something like this that puts me in my own shell. Like a light CTF that is really just shell commands rather than breaking into a VM

mejthemage 10mo ago
I went searching and realized overthewire has a bash specific course called "Bandit". Still a VM you SSH to

lozf 10mo ago

If you like things like this you'll probably enjoy b64(r13(MaE3o3OmYz5yqPNtqUu0VPOxnJpX))

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

ilvez 10mo ago

Constantly hit Ctrl-w and close the tab. Ctrl-Shift-Tab to get back to it :-) God bless saved state, otherwise I would not have completed :D

lcuff 10mo ago

I thought there was too much ambiguity to several of the challenges: I gave up after the following exercise: On the eighth day of Shell my true love gave to me Eight elves in Santa's Workhop/ ... Hint: Try finding files named after Elves and moving them to the Workshop/ directory. It turns out, all they want is the files in the ./Elves directory to the ./Workshop directory. But I didn't figure that out.

imp0cat 10mo ago
You're overthinking it. You can get quite far with a bit of ls or find . -type f exploration
- lcuff 10mo ago
  Failing to understand the basic requirement is not, IMHO, overthinking it. I will admit, as I reread the question and the hint just now, that I just didn't read carefully the first time through. It's actually pretty clear. Sigh. People's minds work quite differently ... As evidenced by people that have strong reactions to particular languages (love or hate), or, as another example, people that love or hate syntax coloring in code. (Yes, it gets in the way for some). The fact that the instructions didn't make the problem clear to me is not an overthinking problem on my part. It would be better for me if the problems were expressed in different ways. When trying to communicate, saying the same thing two different ways is a big step towards helping deal with the variance in people's minds. I wish they'd done that with some of the questions.

entropie 10mo ago

I have serious issues reading that font

naikrovek 10mo ago

I use the shell all day every day and I got stopped at the SECOND question. "lines that contain 'laugh'". lines of what? Doesn't tell you without looking at the answer. genius.

chillfox 10mo ago

That's a nice little challenge. I did have some issues with Day 11 figuring out what it wanted, but overall it was fun.

kwar13 10mo ago

#11 was confusing as hell: this is what worked 'grep -R 'piping' ./place-for-pipers | cut -d: -f2-' only content no filenames. Need to see the output if it's wrong to baseline what's being asked.

tensility 10mo ago

Not giving real output is a complete fail. Try again.