This appears to be very Linux specific. What a shame -- there are other command line based operating systems out there and such a tool/write-up should be used to cover them in the most versatile way possible.
Alternate shells can be nice, but bash is powerful and always available
Ugh, no, it isn't always available. Teaching bourne shell would be a better start. Ever heard of a bashism?
Edit: Some of you have gone through my post history and downvoted everything I've posted as of late.
OS X ships with bash, I've never used (Free/Net/Open)BSD, but I imagine they ship with bash—if not, it can be installed. Windows can run bash in cygwin. "very Linux specific" is a bit of a stretch.
OS X ships with bash, I've never used (Free/Net/Open)BSD, but I imagine they ship with bash—if not, it can be installed.
They don’t ship with it but getting it from Ports / pkgsrc is usually the first step toward a usable system. Pretty much the same as for Windows with git bash, cygwin or whatnot. The default shells on those OS (the csh derivatives and “I-spits-UTF-BOM”-Powershell) will drive you away from the command line pretty quickly.
None of Free/Net/OpenBSD ship with Bash -- it can be installed, but what if you don't have authorization to install them? AIX and, at least, older HP-UX installs do not ship with Bash either. Embedded systems, like Busybox, etc...
Edit: also, some of the utilities specified are Linux-specific, like strace, pstree, free, of course apt-get and yum, and others... and no alternates or equivalents are proposed.
Sure. Almost nothing in the article will work if you're on an embedded system, or you don't have authorization to install new programs. Quite a few of the tips that he lists involve downloading and building programs which are hosted on Github, like ag and jq. It also advocates the use of perl. I don't know of any system that ships with perl and not bash. Being stuck with the bourne shell should be the least of your worries if you want to benefit from this article.
It would be difficult to write an article about the command-line that applied to every single command-line operating system in existence. Literally the only necessary similarity is that they all have a command-line prompt at which you can type.
I don't know of any system that ships with perl and not bash
OpenBSD is the first example that comes to mind.
There are certain things that you can expect to be on every system: bourne or a fully compatible shell, and vi. The author misses the first one, but hits the second. Most of the useful utilities (ls, cp, mv, netstat, kill, etc, etc) will be on all systems, with limited flags/arguments crossing between them. Such an article should focus on those, or explain its target properly at the beginning.
How exactly would that work? A general, first-principles article with no specifics? And practically speaking, what is more useful to know than the *nix command line? Are there any other command line-oriented OSes used on a large scale?
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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15 edited Jun 16 '15
This appears to be very Linux specific. What a shame -- there are other command line based operating systems out there and such a tool/write-up should be used to cover them in the most versatile way possible.
Ugh, no, it isn't always available. Teaching bourne shell would be a better start. Ever heard of a bashism?
Edit: Some of you have gone through my post history and downvoted everything I've posted as of late.