[GTALUG] Tutorials on Linux command-line -- any interest?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk" <talk at gtalug.org>

| Actually William, your offer of a Linux command line tutorial caught my 
| interest. If only I lived closer to the meeting venue ...
| 
| Except that I'm probably going to be using mksh rather than bash. But 
| having some basic vi(m) skills could come in handy. Every time I've had 
| to use vi, it's been the most frustrating hair-pulling nightmare just 
| trying to get that stupid arcanely-user-interfaced program to do the 
| simplest darn thing ...

vi skills are pretty basic to using Linux.  But I don't have them and
I've survived.  I've used UNIX and then Linux as my primary OS since
before vi existed.  Still, I recommend learning vi if you can stand it.

For new users there are a lot of reasonable choices: gedit and
nano/pico, for example.

I happily use an emacs-subset "jove" as my editor.  emacs' keystrokes
are known to nano/pico, alpine (Mail User Agent), and to bash so I'm
mostly OK without vi skills.

(vi grew out of UNIX ed, a "line editor".  The concept of modes is in
its DNA.  Modes are a Bad Thing.  "don't mode me in" is a rallying cry
found on Larry Tesler's t-shirt.)

For decades, emacs was much more powerful than vi and some of that
power is quite useful (eg. multiple buffers and multiple panes).  vim
has probably caught up.

I'm not sure why one would pick mksh ("MirBSD Korn Shell") over bash.
Could you explain?

Here's my initial position:

- Both are bloated recreation of the Bourne Shell.  By bloat, I mean
  they add lots of features and use much more RAM.  Reading the manuals
  is burdensome.  The resource usage is quite affordable these days
  (the Bourne Shell was developed on and for PDP-11 computers
  which limited processes to 64k of code and 64k of data; it used
  quite a bit less; (vi and jove *just* fit back in the day)).

- some of the additional features are really really useful.  I find it
  very hard to live without bash's emacs-keystrokes line editing and how it
  complements the historm mechanism.  I'm pretty sure that this was in
  the original Korn Shell and thus must be in mksh.

bash is everywhere.  Microsoft now supports bash on Win10!  If mksh
has no significant advantage, you are better off with bash.  Are there
significant advantages for you?

mksh claims to take less RAM than bash.  That's good but not
compelling to me.

Pick your fights.  Here are some I've picked:

- I use Linux, not Windows

- I use Jove (emacs subset), not vi, not emacs

- I use C, not C++

- (lost long ago) Atari ST, not IBM PC

And some I have not fought:

- I use whatever desktop my distro provides

- I use bash, not rc (the Plan 9 shell)

- I use Linux, not Plan 9

- (so far) I use C, not Rust

| I may install Windows (7 / 10) in case of a dire need for some Windows 
| functionality. E.g. flashing the ASROCK mainboard bios. But just today 
| (24 July 2017), I learned from D. Hugh Redelmeier's posting, about the 
| FreeDOS alternative for flashing firmware, so I've tucked that idea away 
| in a notes file for future reference -- Thanks Hugh !!

I'm glad you found that useful.  I just assumed (with no basis!) that
everyone knew about FreeDOS.