The bad: You don't see the (wrong) output if you don't get it right the first time, making it hard to work iteratively and having to guess what the question actually intended.
E.g. 'Seven files that start with "Santa"' actually wants file names that start with Santa, after some questions that had you use "grep" to search file contents. Where I actually struggled with what's expected is Day 11.
The ugly: Actually a very nice design.
Just the lines from the files are wanted, not the files names. It took me a little while to cotton on to that.
Semi-spoiler follows.
So you need to use the appropriate flag with grep to suppress the file names.
1. It's difficult to know that it is following from the previous problem, and then on some problems it changes the workspace.
2. It's not always easy to know what it wants.
3. The question about finding a line starting with "The" I successfully cheated:
cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep "The "
cat night-before-christmas.txt | grep "!"
mv *lve* Workshop
Otherwise it's quite fun - the instant feedback is great.
I've long put off learning or even exploring tmux or learning more than a few handful of vim keybinds. So I started digging into configuring them and learning them well enough to be able to regularly use them for work and personal computers.
It's been very pleasant, to say the least. There's still a few ways I need to go where I do everything from the command line and the keyboard, but I think it's worth training your muscles to be comfortable with doing things purely using the keyboard.
I've switched to vim mode for a few tools that offer it. I started seriously using vimium on chrome and firefox (a friend had introduced me to it about 7 years ago but I never cared enough to learn it well).
Another reason I finally made the jump was that I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions. While I've taken measures to improve ergonomic use of the mouse and keyboard, I'm just totally impressed with the capabilities of keyboard navigation and how much value you can extract out of your keyboard.
My friends have been egging on me about the bell curve meme, but I think it's important for me to figure out the limits and then maybe I will finally go back to defaults and simpler tools. The only way to be on the right side of the bell curve is through the middle.
I learnt the basics of vim navigation through it. I'm yet to finish it since I dropped it after the first chapter to start using it as a daily driver and picking things as I need. I will probably come back and go through it again at some point and by then it will be another mind-blown situation
Another one is online tutorials that make you practice interactively. Haven't used those much but the little I did, it was helpful.
It's vim with a GUI, dropdowns for nice discoverability and most importantly the shortcuts on each menu item are the commands to use it in regular vim. It's how I found out vim even had folding waaay back.
For Firefox, I use Tridactyl. After Vimperator died I tried several replacements and found Vimium very limited (IIRC it was the one that was just hotkeys and didn't have modes like vim, no idea how it's grown since then). I have Tridactyl configured to open gvim with the contents of any text input when I hit ctrl+i so I can use vim for them.
> I've been having RSI pain on my right hand due to using mouse too much and in un-ergonomic positions
If you can, try using a left-hand vertical mouse. I use an Evoluent but there are a million brands. Get a cheapo and try it out. I figure it took me about a week to adjust and my wrists have been happier ever since.
I can’t be doing real work and suddenly realize I don’t know the way to do a certain basic action. Lazyvim makes it so that for everything you want to do, there’s an already configured way, and then you have all the time in the world to fiddle for a better alternative if you don’t like it.
Just have some minimal configs for the above and learn more of the default key bindings/behaviour etc. That way you can easily take the above setup to any machine that you move to.
I think a beginner could be doing it right but then be told they are wrong as you aren’t evaluating actual commands
Best would be to like actually run it* and then check solutions out with awk that it pattern matches
* aka give me a shell ok worth a try lol xD
Edit: also I was expecting something a bit more challenging (also that is correct) to like exercise the brain for those of us that use shell (this is hacker news) something that takes a few minutes and isn’t just commands used all the time
And from pipers piping description I had no idea what was wanted of me.
grep laugh *
grep laugh night-before-christmas.txt
Output does not match expected lines - try again
I gave up after the following exercise:
On the eighth day of Shell my true love gave to me Eight elves in Santa's Workhop/ ... Hint: Try finding files named after Elves and moving them to the Workshop/ directory.
It turns out, all they want is the files in the ./Elves directory to the ./Workshop directory. But I didn't figure that out.
I will admit, as I reread the question and the hint just now, that I just didn't read carefully the first time through. It's actually pretty clear. Sigh.
People's minds work quite differently ... As evidenced by people that have strong reactions to particular languages (love or hate), or, as another example, people that love or hate syntax coloring in code. (Yes, it gets in the way for some). The fact that the instructions didn't make the problem clear to me is not an overthinking problem on my part. It would be better for me if the problems were expressed in different ways.
When trying to communicate, saying the same thing two different ways is a big step towards helping deal with the variance in people's minds. I wish they'd done that with some of the questions.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas
The days before the 25th are part of the season of Advent:
But that's kind of understandable when Christmas begins in September if you believe the retailers.
Commercialism is likely the culprit for the current state of affairs. By putting the "Christmas season" and the commercialized variety of festivity before Christmas and making Christmas day the big finale, you create a situation during which you can get people to buy, buy, buy. And then it's over.
Compare that with the real deal and as it was traditionally celebrated. Advent is a period of contemplation, waiting, quiet, abstinence from meat -maybe even fasting - in anticipation for the birth of Christ. Then, on Christmas Eve and especially Christmas day, the festivities kick off, and they last until January 6th (the 12 days of Christmas) or Candlemas (40 days of Christmas). And that's when people used to pack up their trees and decorations (either Jan 6th or Feb 2nd).
People today suck at festivity. We're boring.
Ah, a fellow Commonwealther (I'm Canadian):
I will give this a go, but I doubt any of it will stick!
Perhaps it would be even nicer if the "advent" theme was more prominently present, e.g. using the Bible as the target data file to be used.
Here's three examples tasks from me:
(1) Write an sh script (using only POSIX standard commands) to create a Keywords in Context (KWIC) concordance of the new testament.
(2) Write a bash script that uses grep with regular expressions to extracts all literal quotes of what Jesus said in the New Testament. [Incidentally, doing this task manually marked the beginnings of philology and later automating it marked the beginning of what was later called literary and linguistic computing, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and digital humanities.]
(3) How many times is Jesus mentioned by each of the four accounts of his life (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)?
(You may begin by extracting the New Testament from the end of the Bible with a grep command.)
Like, do a complex background worker for a web server that listens to a socket, does complicated stuff, exports functions (if in Bash), etc.
You don't have to use it afterwards. The value is in the journey. It's fun :)
only content no filenames. Need to see the output if it's wrong to baseline what's being asked.
My answer: `ls -a`
"lines that contain 'laugh'". lines of what? Doesn't tell you without looking at the answer.
genius.
I found a-Shell's documentation[1] quite interesting, it describes their use of web assembly and offers some practical tips for compiling stuff so it can work in a sandboxed environment.
[1]: https://bianshen00009.gitbook.io/a-guide-to-a-shell/lets-do-...
But doesn’t seem to do enough shell escaping or correctly. Also seems underspecified, ie “find 5 lines starting with ‘the” doesn’t require a pipe to head -5.
Especially since the previous two questions used head/tail. IMO, the wording would be better as "find all the lines" since that's what the command does.
other than that - nice exercise for newbie shell dabblers :-)
I did have some issues with Day 11 figuring out what it wanted, but overall it was fun.
b64(r13(MaE3o3OmYz5yqPNtqUu0VPOxnJpX))TL;DR: The page stopped loading properly.
Who would've guessed...
After the 3rd time I had to peek at "learn" to understand what was even asked, I gave up. This is more annoying than fun.