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

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:
> 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

I'll do some.

> ---
>
> 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:

Me.

I generated a PDF for search purposes. The PDF does not have the book
title on the cover page, nor does it have the other usual front matter
(title page, copyright/version history). Page numbers below are from
this PDF. Done means that there is at least one clear example of
syntax and result, an explanation of the purpose of the command, and
perhaps notes on quirks.

>    # chown p. 115, not done
>    # more (less is covered) p. 115, done
>    # wc p 117, done
>    # diff p. 117, done
>    # gzip, gunzip, gzcat not done
>    # grep p. 115, not done
>    # passwd p. 113, done
>    # telnet (ssh is covered) Should simply say that telnet is insecure and should be avoided. Yup, that's what p. 68 says
>    # ftp p. 118 Not done
>    # apt-get, yum p. 70 Basic command done, no attempt to explain options. Perhaps a link to more info?
>    # setenv, unset p. 108, done. Explains that this is not Bash, and how Bash does it.
>    # du -h p. 116, done. df is also done
>    # lynx Not done
>    # ln p. 112, done

OK, that leaves chown, the compression utilities, grep, ftp, apt, yum,
and lynx. I could do all of those tonight and tomorrow, and add
Midnight Commander, which does many common command equivalents in a 24
× 80 (or, actually, any size) text terminal window.

> In BasicSyntax: would be nice to add "A few useful bits of syntax"
> (from the outline):
>
>  1. Enclosing strings in quotation marks

pp. 29, 31, 33, 55, 68, 99, 101, 103, 106, 108 Needs to warn of
inconsistent usage among commands (not done), and the difference
between '' and `` (covered on pp. 55, 113).

>  2. Escaping special characters through quotation marks

p. 29

> and backslashes

'\', pp. 29, 31, 62-64 in detail, in a table with a very bad page
break, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 110

>  3. Continuing a command over multiple lines

Not done.

>  4. White space as separators (any amount is treated the same)

p. 10

> The "for" control construct

p. 90 Main use done; start to explain a second use, and breaks off.

> Aliases

pp. 55, 61-62

> and functions

pp. 52-53

> Regular expressions:

Called "wildcards" and "globbing". "Regular Expression" only occurs in
describing grep.

pp. 26-31

>  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.

I'll let that go.

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And Children are my nation.
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