In the Beginning was the Command Line

History matters. At first glance, many of the commands and idioms of programming seem deliberately obscure. But they are the culmination of an evolutionary process, with twists and turns and dead-ends. Knowing some history, and in particular the history of the Unix operating system, sheds light on what is otherwise occult.

In the Beginning Was the Command Line is a book by Neal Stephenson. Unlike many of his other works, it is short and available for (legal) free download on the internet.

1. For the entire plain text version you can go to his site: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
2. Read the section entitled “THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS.” here: http://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/holehawg.shtml

Note

this badge is a bit incomplete, and you will benefit from having a guide around to help you through it)

Now that you have read the section, let’s honor our shared history by using Unix commands to do the same work for us.

curl -s 'http://www.cryptonomicon.com/command.zip' | gunzip | grep -i -A22 'pipe' | less
# type 'q' to quit from 'less' when you are done.

Let’s break this down.

1. The | takes the text output from one command and pipes it into the input of the next command.

2. research curl: man curl. What does curl do? What about the -s option?

   Curl is a command line client for hitting urls. We can use it to download the web page. -s makes it run ‘silently’.

3. gunzip? What is does gunzip do?

   it unzips the file :) Nothing magical there!

4. What file is gunzip operating on?

   None, really. Or rather it’s operating on a special file called stdin, which is here attached to the stdout out of the curl command, via the pipe.

5. grep -i -A22 'pipe' . grep is the general regular expression parser, that is used to find lines in a file matching an expression. Here, we have thrown on some special switches:

   • -i for case insensitive
   • -A22 for ‘show me the 22 lines after my match. Since each line in the original is a paragraph, this has the effect of getting us the whole section.
   • 'pipe' is what to search on in the incoming stream.

6. less is a pager, which is a program that takes a stream of text, and turns it in ‘screen-size’ ‘pages’ for easier viewing.

Exercises:

1. Look at all the lines including the word pride in Pride and Prejudice (downloadable at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm)

   curl 'http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm' | grep -i 'pride' | less

2. Count those lines using the wc command.

   curl 'http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm' | grep -i 'pride' | wc