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Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

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Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#21
post #18

Great idea! Also to be more inclusive and equitable there should be a parallel group: OBFUS, Old Black Folks with Unix Skills.

Is this satire? Does literally everything have to be segregated by race now? What is not "inclusive" or "equitable" about Old Farts With Unix Skills?

It is satire. OBFUS -> obfuscation

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this satire? Does literally everything have to be segregated by race now? What is not "inclusive" or "equitable" about Old Farts With Unix Skills?

It is satire. OBFUS -> obfuscation

I hope so. It's hard to tell these days.

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#25
post #11

I'd love some material targeted towards people like my aunt (spent the 60s and 70s programming then designing and integrating systems for hospitals, then the 80s managing cattle breeding operations with dBASE) and my father-in-law (PhD mechanical engineer who worked for the German equivalent of ANSI until his retirement in the early 2000s, very comfortable with Windows CMD) to deal with the slick, ever-changing "disc…

Does your aunt or f-i-l really need to know? I know older nerds who only use a smartphone for texts and voice calls, and who can't be bothered wasting time on social media. So far (anyway) "essential" apps like banking ones and government ones and "remotely check your home security cameras/solar panel output/etc" ones seem to be paralleled on the Web and accessible through a browser.

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#26
I'm 40 and I feel here and there. Oldest memories are accessing BBSes over the phone line and still everyone seems to have forgotten that those were a thing. There was a list of local BBSes on the newspaper and it was like 20 or 30 around my area.

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#27
post #4

Sounds like the courses you are berating don't even rise to the level of "button pushers" that we mocked when they ran their Microsoft GUI's to do admin chores (and while we were converting thousands of files in one command, and do daily .. except that we are now converting (growl) webp files that can't be edited (not by GIMP anyway) ) Even so-called "computer savvy" young people just know which buttons to push, and…

>And MacOS. Sheesh. Gotta do this: chsh -s /bin/bash What's wrong with zsh?

Not OP. But zsh isn't bash, and I am not about relearn my shell-fu.

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#28
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And MacOS. Sheesh. Gotta do this: chsh -s /bin/bash What's wrong with zsh?

Not OP. But zsh isn't bash, and I am not about relearn my shell-fu.

zsh is derived from bash and much of the syntax and behavior is identical.

Also there are plugins like https://github.com/chrissicool/zsh-bash

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#29
post #26

I'm 40 and I feel here and there. Oldest memories are accessing BBSes over the phone line and still everyone seems to have forgotten that those were a thing. There was a list of local BBSes on the newspaper and it was like 20 or 30 around my area.

I remember BBSes as having much more polite conversations than you find these days on social media, too!

Re: Ask HN: Old Folks with Unix Skills

#30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And MacOS. Sheesh. Gotta do this: chsh -s /bin/bash What's wrong with zsh?

Not OP. But zsh isn't bash, and I am not about relearn my shell-fu.

1. It works just like bash if you want.

2. Scripts with #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh run as expected — even with bashisms.

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