Name: Anonymous 2013-12-12 19:15
After years of peer pressure, I finally settled on learning some UNIX. I installed Slackware linux on an old PC (This part was relatively painless) and grabbed a book about UNIX at the Library.
First thing I should know is how to set up my terminal. Cool! I'm not sure if I fully understand what they are talking about, but let's go on. Hundreds of pages about serial lines, parity bits, escape codes, tput, termcap and terminfo, how the DEC and TeleVideo devices handle tabs... An entire chapter is about the backspace, delete and rubout(?) keys. I'm baffled but don't want to give up too early. Maybe I don't see the point of all these informations just yet, but it might come in handy later.
Next I'm told to get some informations about my shell. The author advices me to ask the system administrator about some details. Who? What other users? What do you mean I should run a program called nice whose purpose is to be nice to other users when I run a big shell script? This is my own personal computer, I own plenty, I don't have to share it!
Another chapter is about system accounting. Looks like I will be charged for CPU usage and disk space... Nevermind.
Later, I get to learn everything about backups. Finally something relevant. There's a nifty program called tar, the tape archiver. It pads blocks with NULL bytes to let room for the tape to start moving. If I accidentally delete some important file, I can always ask my system administrator to restore it from a tape in the storage room. I'll get it next morning. The good news is that it seems I can buy a tape drive for as little as $2000 at Newegg.
I'm pretty bored at this point. It was amusing for a while but now I feel that I am not learning anything useful. I start to skip whole chapters.
Let's see, Mail. I can use the tape archiver, pipe its output to the compress utility and then to uuencode to send a whole set of documents. But I should manually check every shar archives from unreliable Usenet sources, because they could execute arbitrary malicious code. System V or Berkeley? Some versions of this program don't have the -e switch, ask your system administrator to install the GNU version or get the sources from Usenet and compile it yourself... vi is a powerful text editor, it can open multiple files at once. The line printer. The serial line was left in an inconsistent state... run this script with cron to periodically remove core dumps in your home directory... check if the Send Data light flashes, a serial cable might be unplugged. If unsure ask your system administrator.
Is this some kind of joke? People wasting their time with an OS written 40 years ago?
First thing I should know is how to set up my terminal. Cool! I'm not sure if I fully understand what they are talking about, but let's go on. Hundreds of pages about serial lines, parity bits, escape codes, tput, termcap and terminfo, how the DEC and TeleVideo devices handle tabs... An entire chapter is about the backspace, delete and rubout(?) keys. I'm baffled but don't want to give up too early. Maybe I don't see the point of all these informations just yet, but it might come in handy later.
Next I'm told to get some informations about my shell. The author advices me to ask the system administrator about some details. Who? What other users? What do you mean I should run a program called nice whose purpose is to be nice to other users when I run a big shell script? This is my own personal computer, I own plenty, I don't have to share it!
Another chapter is about system accounting. Looks like I will be charged for CPU usage and disk space... Nevermind.
Later, I get to learn everything about backups. Finally something relevant. There's a nifty program called tar, the tape archiver. It pads blocks with NULL bytes to let room for the tape to start moving. If I accidentally delete some important file, I can always ask my system administrator to restore it from a tape in the storage room. I'll get it next morning. The good news is that it seems I can buy a tape drive for as little as $2000 at Newegg.
I'm pretty bored at this point. It was amusing for a while but now I feel that I am not learning anything useful. I start to skip whole chapters.
Let's see, Mail. I can use the tape archiver, pipe its output to the compress utility and then to uuencode to send a whole set of documents. But I should manually check every shar archives from unreliable Usenet sources, because they could execute arbitrary malicious code. System V or Berkeley? Some versions of this program don't have the -e switch, ask your system administrator to install the GNU version or get the sources from Usenet and compile it yourself... vi is a powerful text editor, it can open multiple files at once. The line printer. The serial line was left in an inconsistent state... run this script with cron to periodically remove core dumps in your home directory... check if the Send Data light flashes, a serial cable might be unplugged. If unsure ask your system administrator.
Is this some kind of joke? People wasting their time with an OS written 40 years ago?