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Suicide Linux (2009)

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Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#51
> As another, slightly more serious suggestion, if Suicide Linux randomly deleted a single file without telling you every time you made a typographical error, it might be an interesting look into the stability of your operating system and an educational tool for diagnosing and repairing corrupted systems.

I seem to recall an experimental indie game that worked this way. If your character died, a random file on your hard disk was deleted. It was a really interesting idea to highlight our implicit assumptions around what games can and can't do, and a way to raise the stakes of the gameplay experience.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#54

For those who aren't ready for Suicide Linux yet, there's `sl`, a command that mildly punishes you for not being able to type `ls`, available in most distros. sudo apt install sl

So if you're not ready for SL you can try sl, which uses little letters so it's not as scary. Nice.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#55
Oh, I felt attacked there for a moment. I have a circa 2015ish desktop that's actually got hard drives in it that consist of a Slackware15 install, a partial Kali, and I think an incomplete Linux From Scratch tool chain. I've nuked it so many times. Usually by falling victim to the temptation to fuck with libc after 8 p.m. This generally has to then be resolved by either recovery LiveUSB, or in one daring case, one SSH daemon session holding on for dear life after creatively tweaking the LD path to cannibalize libraries from another partially working/compiled distro to limp the system back to a bootable order. Learned a lot about how linker/loaders worked that weekend. Then there was the war of the bootloaders when it still had windows on it. Finally purged that with prejudice.

Now I just have to figure out how in the hell to setup bootloading with UBoot for an OrangePI 5 so I can actually start using kernels other than theirs, then I'm set for my next experience crashing system boards with no survivors.

When my juniors ask how I know so much about computers, I can honestly say it's because I am the single most poorly behaved user of other people's code on the planet.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#57
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH. Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?" I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.

This is generally called a command-not-found handler and are a feature of all the major shells (though the exact details differ, the general idea is to define a function with a specific reserved name), and most majors distros have ones that can be installed, even if they aren't by default. I wrote my own (much faster) such handler for Arch Linux. I even wrote a blog post about the design: https://vorpal.se/posts/2025…

I thought of that, but TFA describes a system that trips on incorrect filenames rather than just incorrect commands.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#58
post #29
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that ships with a default zsh shell, which is a surprising number of distros actually.

Do any of the major ones? Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, etc. don't.

Wikipedia:

> Zsh is available for Microsoft Windows as part of the UnxUtils collection and has been adopted as the default interactive shell for macOS, Deepin, and Kali Linux.

Mac is, in principle, a pretty big deal, but otherwise it isn't a common default.

Re: Suicide Linux (2009)

#59
post #7
post #2

> I suppose I should finally clear this up: The autocorrect functionality I originally described here was a feature of the first Linux systems I ever used, so I assumed it was how every Linux system worked by default. Since then I've come to understand that it's a completely optional extra doodad. What systems did this? I've never encountered one that I can recall.

I'm on my phone so I'm too lazy to dig for this, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about the bit of shell script that gets run if you type a command that isn't found in PATH. Fedora and Debian will both dive straight into searching apt/dnf for a matching package and ask "do you want to install this?" I imagine you could create a hook that gets run for any command failure, but again I'm on my phone so not sure.

cachy's setup of fish tries to suggest commands (and even arguments) it might be, which I find terrifying and so turn off.
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