Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do<\/i> believe that avoiding the command line\u2014or worse, disparaging it\u2014is leaving a lot on the table.<\/p>\n
Doug McIlroy’s original conception<\/a> of hooking up programs as if there were a garden hose between them is a powerful and liberating idea and arguably one of the most important Unix innovations. You can see it in action in this video about Unix<\/a> where Brian Kernighan pipes together some simple programs to build a spell checker or in the famous McIlroy rejoinder to Knuth on writing a word count program<\/a>.<\/p>\n But you don’t even need the power of pipes to see the usefulness of the shell. Mirco has a short post that demonstrates 5 one line shell invocations to solve various problems<\/a>. In a sense, they’re all trivial problems but try to imagine a better way of solving them\u2014especially with a GUI program in your toolkit.<\/p>\n As far as I can see, these examples are semispecific to Bash and Linux. For example, the last example of negating a file specification doesn’t appear to work with the zshell<\/a> (although I’m certain there’s an extension that makes it work) and the Perhaps I’m just old fashioned and pining for the old days. Or perhaps I’m anticipating the time when I can finally wave my cane at all those pesky kids. Whatever the case, I do believe that avoiding the command line\u2014or … Continue reading date<\/code> example depends on the version of date<\/code> you’re using. Still, they demonstrate how you can often use the shell to solve a simple problem quickly and easily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"