For those who don’t know the name “Carla Schroder”, she is a strange woman and the author of peculiar title Linux Cookbook. Apparently, there is a little problem in Planet Carla where people have been “brainwashed” to believe that CLI is hard to use. Well, let’s break this down a little, shall we?
- “Anyone who can type can use the command line, like this:
$ whoami
carla“
Well, that seems intuitive enough except that typing “whatsmyname” will not give you the same result. Schroder obviously has forgotten the fact that Earth people don’t have a telepathic link between their brains and bash shell and will always have to look up in order to find the right command.
- “Hmm, OK, but at least it didn’t wig out and bluescreen like some fragile, trembling operating systems we know and snicker at.”
It seems Schroder’s homeworld has this strange operating system that gives you a blue screen whenever you type “where” in it. Well, sure we all learn something new every day!
- “I relate to dates better in a calendar:
$ cal“
Wow, so when I type “cal”, the CLI actually gives me a Gregorian calendar rather than lines of rubbish that are only readable to little green men from space. Magic, you think, but what am I supposed type to invoke a calculator? You know, like the one you can find in that operating system that Schroder and the like “snicker” at, provided that there is such function at all?
- “Want to know your computer’s name?
$ hostname“
That’s cute, Carla, but let’s try something harder, shall we, say, showing all the files in a given directory? Do I just type “listallfiles”, “getfilenames”, “filenames” or what? I mean, CLI is supposed to be so easy you can just throw guesses at it and it will just give you the stuff you want, right?
- “'Man’ pages are manual pages, so you could type 'man clear’ to learn more about it.”
This somehow gives me the impression of a Freudian slip regarding Schroder’s personal life, but, hey, haven’t we all at one point or another “snickered” at the idea of naming a command “man”?
Even the Weather Girls would be amused.
Comments
Seriously. Whatever the motivation behind the unix FS commands was, it certainly was not intuitiveness. The one that always annoys me is cat. How the hell is that supposed to imply anything aside from “meow” and/or bloody scratches? The manual doesn’t help, all it says is that’s what you use to concatinate files. Oh wait, but if you stop and think, concatinating a file with nothing else just prints out the one file. And if you just type “cat” it gives you a blank line and a cursor. No “I am assuming that you’re 1337 enough to feed me input directly.”
Totally agree, Ameer.
Another thing that amuses me about Unix systems is that “everything is a file”.
That is totally silly. Unix is defective by design (© FSF). I mean, why a printer should be a file ? Why a hard disk should be a file ? Why my f*cking mouse should be a file ?
It’s even funnier when Linux zealots come and tell everybody “Linux is very powerful, because everything is a file”.
Any software programmer KNOWS that “everything is a file” is total bullsh*t. I mean, in the 70s, it was certainly easier to deal only with files. But it’s 2010, come on.
Can you point out some scinarios where that’s an actual problem? I haven’t done enough unix programming to run into any*.
*Unless you’re talking about ioctl(1): placeholder function for performing arbitrary operations on file descriptors, assuming that they support them, all with highly primitive error handling last I looked.
Oops, it’s ioctl(2), or is it 3?
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