101–110 of 150 posts
Debian (stable, at least) doesn't use his version anymore. The HISTORY section of the current manual says
> This su command was derived from coreutils' su, which was based on an implementation by David MacKenzie. The util-linux version has been refactored by Karel Zak.
I was discussing how the only info I found was in a remote wikipedia article, yet incomplete. the guy told me he had written that article too.
good times
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Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…
> 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science Long before standing for true or false, 1 and 0 have stood for the presence or absence of something arbitrary, so I don't see any issue here.
(There is no completion. The trailing off is intended.)
We write things down so we don’t have to rely on memory. Working as intended.
I always tell people: "You think I wrote this manual for you, but I'm not that altruistic. I wrote it for future me."
To be fair, not exactly the same thing. I typically remember I wrote it, just not what it does or how it works. :-)
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Worse : You Google a question and realise you yourself asked it many moons ago and it never got answered.
Oh man this happened to me last month. I was even wondering how this guy had the exact same issue that I was having and only realized after a while that it was literally me who posted it. I eventually found an answer and decided to post an answer in case future me forgets it again.
This is especially frustrating because your question is likely to pop up first in your search results because you probably phrase things the same way even years later!
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I go through the same thing but with a few "popular" GitHub issues. Every time I encounter those bugs I Google it and the first result in my comment on the issue that explains the workaround I used. That's probably how early Alzheimer feels.
I sometimes have to go back to GitHub issues I created, that I bookmarked for this specific reason. I think that the Internet has modified how our brains retain information. I don't think this is an original idea, but I've observed that I'm real good at indexing where I saw some piece of information and very poor at storing the actual piece of information. I have to physically write things down to commit them to reca…
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I use the `ln` command a lot. I use the `man ln` command _almost_ as much.
What finally got the `ln` argument order engraved in my mind was learning that you can skip the destination argument: ln -s /foo/bar/baz will create a soft link in the CWD named baz, pointing to /foo/bar/baz. So you see, if you know that you can always skip the destination, then, logically, the source must be the first one!
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I think what a lot of people don’t get about the Unix command line is that learning to use the tool is part of the experience. Sure I forget the precise flags to get various tools doing what I need, but browsing the man page and rediscovering the breadth of the tool is half the beauty.
What? That’s some intense Stockholm syndrome right there.
I remember the times before I learned Bash and the Unix userland. Those where dark times. I was stuck on Windows 98, which I really didn’t like. It just felt so needlessly crippled. When I discovered Bash, Debian, the Unix way, it felt like a breath of fresh air.
These days I’m on macOS. And one of the best things about it is that it’s a great desktop operating system, with a Unix under the hood. The userland Apple ships is quite dated, but that’s easily solvable by installing GNU Coreutils etc via Homebrew.