[FM Discuss] Further sections needed in the Introduction to the Command Line

[Andy Oram]

I'm happy to say that after a day or so of editing I'm happy with the
material in the book. This is testimony to high quality of every
submission. As a reminder, it's here:

  http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/CommandLineIntro/WebHome

I edited or re-checked the parts from INTRODUCTION through REALLY
ADVANCED,many of which were in. I skimmed the rest and feel it's less
critical, but I'm going back to it after sending this mail.

I found places where I feel chunks of information should be
added. I've filled in a few, but I don't want to try to fill in
everything that's missing. Could you spread the word around and see if
you can find volunteers to work on these?

Andy

---

Important commands:

  The following were added by someone to the outline, and I think most
  of the following (perhaps not all) should be in the book:

    # chown
    # more (less is covered)
    # wc
    # diff
    # gzip, gunzip, gzcat
    # grep
    # passwd
    # telnet (ssh is covered)
    # ftp
    # apt-get, yum
    # setenv, unset
    # du -h
    # lynx
    # ln

In BasicSyntax: would be nice to add "A few useful bits of syntax"
(from the outline):

  1. Enclosing strings in quotation marks
  2. Escaping special characters through quotation marks and backslashes
  3. Continuing a command over multiple lines
  4. White space as separators (any amount is treated the same)

The "for" control construct

Aliases and functions

Regular expressions:

  I'm thinking of taking the sed section and putting it into a chapter
  that consists of: regular expression introduction, grep, sed. I
  could probably do this myself, but I'd like to see whether someone
  else would do it.

Languages (Python, etc.):

  This section isn't what I expected, but I suppose it's OK. Actually,
  the sections on AWK and sed are nice introductions. For the
  scripting languages (Perl, Python, and Ruby) what I expected was a
  description of the basic elements that make them valuable for people
  who want to move up from scripting bash: arithmetic, arrays,
  objects. But what we have at present is a different kind of feel for
  what they offer.