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Yeah, the Chris Dixon analogy piqued my interest too. I've thought about it a bit, and I've identified two useful ways to generalise UNIX commands to web busin
by jboy 12y ago
Yeah, the Chris Dixon analogy piqued my interest too. I've thought about it a bit, and I've identified two useful ways to generalise UNIX commands to web businesses:
1. Take a command that would run over files on a filesystem, and instead run it over pages on the Web.
Examples: find | xargs grep -i -> web search engines (Google, etc.). talk -> IRC / ICQ. Creating timestamped text files in a per-user directory -> blogging.
2. Take a very powerful & useful UNIX command that's complex to use correctly (and possibly damaging if you screw it up), and make it easy, user-friendly and risk-free.
Examples: rsync -> Dropbox. awk -> spreadsheets (Visicalc, MS Excel).
I'm currently racking my brains for other commands that seemed useful but complex to me in my Linux sysadmin youth. :)
- jacquesm 12y agoYou could extend that concept to bash one-liners, those tend to do a lot of work for the amount of effort put in. tail -10000 httpd.log | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail That sort of thing.