bojasv/beunix

shell programming

beUnix

shell programming - tools and learnings of Unix-based operating systems

Brief - the how and why?

what do you do when you've spend thousands of hours per year, for last several years working on a green-screen terminal?

the first thing you do is, save yourself from getting blind, atleast color-blind, so, I got myself an eyewear and I toggled screen colors. (yes, it's a possibility in non-CRT era LED by advanced optics)

then I tried to overcome 'the attachment' of the system operating the screen.
now ignorning the adjust my eyewear needed, I stared blankly at the dim-lit green-screen... (⊙_⊙)

and suddenly, all those strange lexis start flooding your head that you heard, read, even uttered incidentally as a software professional over the course of several years like terminal, command-line, CLI, DOS, CMD.exe, batch, bash, sh, shell ... linux, Linus Torvalds, kernel ...
it continues ...
... unix (auto-corrects to UNIX), ls, grep ... until you hear Leo whistling and pointing at you

This brought my attention to a moment that I was oblivious to, and not-so-hilariously, UNIX appeared out of that word-cloud in my head.

During my junior high school, I read about CMD while browsing the Internet to troubleshoot a Windows issue. As I used it on school lab PC, the black-n-white app looked pretty boring but I had also read about how a prank could be played using this, so I pulled it on my fellow backbenchers...oh what a joy I felt until I was caught by the lab instructor.
I first read about Unix back in 2011, in some article on Linux in Chip magazine and how folks designing their own OS using it and running it on Raspberry Pi boards. I got introduced about its design and applications during Engineering in quite a hasty manner. As an IBM i developer, I often used commands like mkdir, rmdir, qsh, pwd, cd, ls, grep while working with Integrated File System (IFS), file transmission (FTP) and web-services requirements. After feeding characters for several years from my untiring hands, it is only that several several thousandth day, I looked closely at this pretty monochromatic display and lost in thoughts of the blank command-line.

Re-calling its flexibility to customizations at a deep level, and considering its simplicity and wide acceptability, to me, this clicked as the next techy thing to explore. All the reasons I just mentioned, also makes this a ride filled with challenges and diversity.

PS: oh yes, not to forget, those green terminals also get you a good glimpse into the BTS of graphics-based interfaces, such as Windows and Mac.

what do I know about Unix?

first and foremost, it is okay to write it as Unix, but not when you're serious, then it's UNIX.
second, it is designed by the same folks who developed the C.
thirdly, it is widely used in file manipulations and running servers around the world, and
finally, I've heard that it pays well to know this system. Pays well in what sense? IDK.

what do I want to do with Unix?

know it thru it's commands, play around with it and perhaps design a prank for my colleagues 😜

published on: 2023-10-19
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