Tim Chase writes:
> I find that, for myself, you learn the basic family of commands (the root
> command name) and what it does. I usually have a handful of common
> parameters memorized, such as "-r" or "-R" meaning "recurse into
> subdirectories" or "--verbose" for extra output.
What an excellent response, and done in the best Unix
spirit.
One thing I do is to make little cheat sheets, so to
speak consisting of what worked the last time I ran the command.
The example of when you burn CD's is an excellent command that
one may not run every day and if you get one thing wrong, you
waste a CDR or at least waste time, so when something works out
like I wanted it, I do the following command:
history >somefile
Of course, somefile is whatever name you like that is meaningful
and conforms to the file-naming rules. What you will get might
look like:
1 stamp
2 folder +grml
3 n
4 folder +inbox
5 scan cur
That probably looks like garbage to most of you, but the
command numbers are the order in which I ran them today. In
that example, command 1 was the word stamp which is a little
time tracking program I wrote for myself that lets me keep track
of the number of hours I work. At lunch, I will type stamp again
to stop the count. I use nmh to do mail so a few of you may
recognize those commands. If you type a huge ugly command that
spans 3 or 4 lines, the history command will let you relive that
gripping moment and save it to remind you later of the syntax so
you don't have to re-learn it.
There is also a command called col which is really neat
for stripping out the formatting codes in man pages. If, for
example, there is a command with lots of flags that you want to
run, do:
man thecommand |col -b >someotherfile
What you get is a clean ascii-text file with the man page from
start to finish. You can then use your favorite editor and zero
in on the example and edit it to your needs.
I have been using various kinds of Unix for about 16
years and couldn't function without these little tricks for
making the system work.
When you get a little further along, start learning
about regular expressions. These are special blocks of
characters that, rather than spelling out specific words and or
punctuation marks, describe the general characteristics of what
you are looking for and then do something based on whether or
not the regular expression matched. The regular expression
[0-9], for instance, will match any single digit but nothing
else. Do a man on regex and you will see a good explanation.
Spend some time and play with an unimportant file of text to
learn how the regular expressions make life easier, at least
when you get things working.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
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