The Underscore Archives

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 06:42:39PM +0000, World of Jake wrote:
> >>> A real newbie when it comes to *nix command line stuff...
> >> Unix is very user friendly. It's just very picky about who its  
> >> friends are.
> >
> > Beards:
> > -------
> I have a Grade 3 beard (that's Grade 3 in length, not severity).  
> Would this be of assistance or would I be viewed as a *nixy wannabe?

I was lying, most of the unix folks I meet these days are clean shaven
professionals who take work seriously and occaionally even have social
lives. It's just underscore that has a surfeit of beards. :)

> > Sandals:
> > --------
> I only wear sandals during the summer, and only then when the sun is  
> out and when I'm near the sea. Is there an alternative to sandals?

Anything you like actually!

> > Virii:
> > ------
> I've done a search on the internet and can't find any reference to  
> "virii". But there are plenty of viruses...

My bad, although I think there's more latin users alive now than at
any time before so if we want to use virii we should. We certainly
shouldn't stop because Tom Christiansen says so and some geek wannabe
has to post about it on wikipedia. For all we know Tom has never
studied latin, and probably neither has the geek that wrote the
wikipedia page.

According to google (perhaps a fairer ranking of word use):

Results 1 - 10 of about 694,000 for virii. (0.15 seconds) 
Results 1 - 10 of about 50,100,000 for viruses

So, viruses is about 70 times more popular, but virii does appear to
be in "quite common" usage as well and certainly has a known meaning.

> > Mounting:
> > ---------
> I've done some of that. What _is_ a dirty foreign filesystem? NTFS?

One that was unmounted properly, one that's not clean, and may not be
safe to use. I understand you were jesting, but I am really a beardie
with sandals on so I have to take you seriously. In real life I'd
shout about it and mention something about how it was better on a
PDP-xx. I have bad body odour too so that I can conform to stereotype
properly!

> > Also, if you must use a shell prompt try out a good (IMO!) shell like
> > zsh

> On the shell front, I'm using the bash default on OSX -- does it  
> really make that much of a difference? Considering I know only  
> dangeorous ninja commands like chmod, chown, rm, rmdir etc., would  
> zsh be a practicable alternative?

Nah, zsh is really good, so much so that the completeion control stuff
in bash is actually just COPIED from zsh. If you have to use a
computer you have to use a GUI or a commandline, there's good and bad
of each as you know. Zsh is a far too well kept secret as it makes
your life way easier and those fat beardie techies with sandals and BO
just don't want that!

> n00berifically yours,

But, my, you already know leet speak!

:)

        Steve