#shell programming

[fatehbaz]

weekly navel-gazing update: this week is most consequential event in long time. keyword search: "scared" "is it ok to be scared" "beaten and tortured by the ogre"

[deadclockghost]

Mermay Day 1 - Seashells

[battlevann]

After playing through chapter 1 of dream bbq I've begun to think that the mannequins we see throughout the game are the mass produced bases of ENA's that either never received their ENA shell or somehow lost it, leading to them no longer recognizing their identity or purpose as an ENA, which is why they are either dead or walking aimlessly

[sainteclectic]

on a semi-related note. every day metal sonic fans fight for their LIVES trying to get sega to explore the existential horror that is being metal sonic

[vinnigami]

doodle your favorite demon :0

I have too many ‘favorite demons’ to choose (Amanozako, Norn, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Kushinada-Hime, Bai Suzhen, and way too many more..) but i’ve been on an smt angels kick as of late. So I just drew Virtue

[12neonlit-stage]

I go by no pronouns but not as in my name, more so like my pronouns are an undefined variable in shell coding

[conceptuma]

ariane: elster i need you to delete sys32

[dimalink]

Near the shore – shells at the shore

Text quest. About shore. Imagine for yourself, that you are suddenly, appeared at the island. Sand. Around you - it is a sand. As a beach. And sand line along the shore. To the far. It is so a summer island. To the depth -it is forest. Dark, green. And ocean is from another side. With blue water. And blue sky. Weather is cloudless. And it is a hot day.

Now, you are walking along the shore. And since this moment  you start your adventure. This is a text quest. And you need to write commands here. Game is linear. And along the shore all the places - there are shells. You need to collect them. If you walk game to the end. So you will see which shells – you collect. There are 8 of them total. And game is about 32  game scenes. But some scenes have several screens.

Maybe, most big question for quests. And with text quests too. This is logic. How a lot actions have a logic. What do you need to do – to go next? And how good it is easy to understand from the description. Mainly, with this game, you need to go to the different directions. North, south, west, east. And with the text it is written about this – to the north you see this. To the south you see this. And this means, you  go to one of these directions.

If there is item, which you need to take for walkthrough. So it is written – before your eyes there is something laying. With the usage of items, maybe, it is most this moment. Well, I cannot, as a developer, write it this way. Here you need to use crystal. For example. Player need by himself to get this idea, about this place to do something. This is most narrow moment in logic.

Do not forget to collect shells in game. It is so interesting moment. They are different here. Big. Green. Red. It will be here pair of dialogs. For example, a conversation with jean.  Which can help you. If you have shells. This is a water symbol. This is so mysterious element. Something it is connected with the water. Water - second element. But what the way – nobody gives explanation. And I do not explain it too. Open moment in game. You can use fantasy, as I can say.

Element with fantasy. Little of mystics. So fairytale and strange thing happens with you. You are at the island. And walk by sand. So, look, - someone made a castle out of sand! Sandy castle. Not big. Someone was playing here. But nobody is here now!

With this view.  Game is also like some strange and interesting quests. Like Riven and Myst. So there, you are inside the book. And this is a video quests. Strange locations. Everything is so unusual. Mechanisms. Island. Amazing places. Here is also same thing, but with the text form. And you are walking by sand.

Quests -are interesting genre. Text quests – I want to do them all the time. I remember, I dream about a house with ghosts. Something about vampires, but I do not know what certain. About mystics. About fantasy. And standalone block – science fiction. It can be some  imitation of Star trek next Generations. Or maybe, something like my own. Something amazing about space. Some event. And all around this.

And here it is blue background as Norton Commander. It is start idea. Game with blue background. With retro view. At the low – it is a line. Once again. Like Norton Commander – commands. Which are available at the scene. And a story. About ocean. But, no, it is about yellow sand and shore. But references to the water are all the time here. Sand, water, sky. Some kind travel to the picture. You find out someway yourself there. And now you are there. And it is everything some unique way in this place to go. And little strange. But it consists from familiar things.

Shells – water symbol. Magic creatures. Phoenix and jean. Wall with sand. Underwater cave with crystals. Forest. With parrots. And mainly - sand. And to walk along the sand. This is most big part here. Center part of the storyline. Sand. And you are walking by it. Shore. Sometimes, you are walking by water. Like, something, - it is valuable. But it is not have a tale why it is valuable, what is the things are here.

Collect shells at the shore. It is second element. Symbol of water. Here it is valuable. Like, it is some dimension. Shells and shore. Near the shore. What a nice day it is here. Sky, blue sky, nice ocean. And lots of sand.

Basic Pascal version 1.18 "Duckling" – most newest version. In this version there are 4 new games! Puddles at Countryside, Duckling Pseudo 3D, Road to Countryside, Duckling Goes 2D. And even more retro games! It is a pack of retro games with modern versions of Basic and Pascal.

It is now in development new version Basic Pascal pack games. This game will be included in a new version.

Basic Pascal: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/games/basicpascal/index_eng.html Website: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/home_eng.html Itchio: https://dimalink.itch.io/basic-pascal

[arkowitz]

[batneko]

HEY GUESS WHAT

A/B/O bowuigi, alpha Luigi and omega Bowser, based on an idea I wrote a while ago (though I did end up changing a few of the details).

I hope everyone enjoys! 🙌

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[piratesexmachine420]

It makes me giggle a little every time I have to write a Bash script with conditionals. There's something very funny about the orthogonality here.

Yeah, sure, why wouldn't the square bracket be a program at /usr/bin/[?

This is why it technically isn't a bash syntax error to forget the matching ]. ] is an argument to the program [, and there's no reason that [ wouldn't be able to run with that argument missing. It's entirely a measure for keeping up appearances. It's also why you need the spaces between the brackets and the test expression.

I wish every piece of shell control flow worked like that.

[mesaprotector]

Clarity trumps efficiency.

*I would've liked to write this essay to be understandable for someone without a programming/Linux background, but it was a bit too difficult. If you skip to the paragraph beginning with "...", it gets a bit easier from then on.

If you’ve ever written your own shell scripts you may have heard of the phrase “useless use of cat*”, or less tactfully, “cat abuse”. This refers to the practice, common among new shell script enthusiasts, of writing commands like “cat file.txt | grep name”, when “grep name file.txt” would serve perfectly well. Tools like shellcheck will bug you about it—along with similar constructions like “ps ax | grep Discord | wc -l” instead of “pgrep -c Discord”.

Well, I’m here to defend cat abuse! There are two arguments I see against the cat | grep construction, one of which is valid but situational, and the other of which is completely invalid. The former is that the extra pipe just adds additional overhead into the command. Yes, it does. And it’s unlikely to matter at all if you’re using it on 20KiB text files on a system built in the past 40 years; however, in production, when writing tools that need to be able to deal with arbitrarily large text files as efficiently as possible, sure.

The latter is “well, it’s just unnecessary”. I disagree. I think the cat | grep construction—along with similar such as grep | wc, ps | grep, ps | awk, and so on—serves a very important purpose in that it makes shell scripts easier to read, easier to modify, and easier to debug.

Consider this example from above:

ps ax | grep Discord | wc -l

Read the process table; filter for "Discord"; count the number of lines. It’s very atomic. Each operation can be swapped out for something else without confusing the reader. On the other hand:

pgrep -c Discord

Now, this does the same thing—counting the number of lines in the process table with "Discord" in them. It looks like only one operation... but it’s really still three in disguise. And worse, imagine you suddenly want to add another filter; sorting not only by Discord, but by processes that include the word “title”. This is not straightforward at all! It turns out that while regex has a standard way of searching for alternatives, it really does not provide an easy method for searching for BOTH of two words. On the other hand, with the atomic version, it’s easy:

ps ax | grep Discord | grep title | wc -l

Take that, “useless” use of cat.

There’s a broader meaning, though, to my statement of “clarity trumps efficiency”. I apply it to every aspect of use of electronics, from web searches to backup routines to yes, silly little shell scripts that use cat.

I use command aliases, but to a pretty limited degree; I avoid cutesy stuff like “ll” for “ls -l” and “yeet” for “pacman -Rns”, along with possibly-dangerous substitutions like “rm” for “rm -i”; I’d never dream of aliasing “nano” or “vi” to my preferred text editor (vim). I believe strongly that my commands should be transparent, and saving me from my own muscle memory once or twice is not worth making them completely opaque.

Tab completion on the other hand is one of my favorite features in the shell. It’s the perfect combination of transparent and convenient; without having to alias any of my application names or get hit by the information overload fuzzy finding gives you, I can still launch any of them in no more than four keystrokes. (Except audacious and audacity, admittedly.)

I use a floating window manager (Openbox), and when I need to briefly use a tiling layout, I have a very boring way of doing so: focusing each window one by one and moving it into the slot I want. (While holding down the Super/Windows key, 1-C-2-V does a basic left-right split.)

... I make some use of spellcheck on assignments to be turned in, but never autocorrect, which I abhor even in messaging apps. Every change to your inputs should be deliberate; otherwise you’ll never learn what you’re doing wrong, and you’ll never need to be precise because you’ve turned over that part of your brain to the algorithm.

This leads me to an important corollary of my principle: “it’s better to have a slow algorithm that you understand, than a fast one that you don’t”.

Satya Nadella’s vision of the PC of the future is one where you tell it what to do in natural language and it interprets that using LLMs and so on into machine instructions. Instead of viewing a PC as a toolbox you go into the workshop with, and work on projects with in certain defined ways, he wants the PC to be an assistant; you give the assistant directions and pray that it gets things right. Of course you aren’t allowed into the workshop with the tools anymore; that’s the assistant’s job!

Anyone who’s used Google Search over the past ten years knows how miserable this model is; you search for a specific phrase that Google “helpfully” corrects to something it thinks you meant. There was a learning curve to the old way, but once you learned how to state queries precisely, you were done; now you need to play psychologist, sociologist, and statistician all at once.

This is a decent part of why I dislike generative AI, though far from the main reason. I don’t want an opaque algorithm making decisions for me, unless those decisions are incredibly low-level stuff like core parking that no human should be directly involved with in the first place.

To get back to my own setup, I have a whole text file documenting the system maintenance process I go through once every month; most of it could be automated, but I make every step a deliberate choice. Not to go all new-age, but for me specifically—it all ties back in to mindfulness.

I think people have only a vague concept of what mindfulness is. Until two years ago or so, I was the same way. But to who I am now, mindfulness means not doing anything on autopilot. Instead of letting yourself half-doze off on a drive home, scarcely remembering the 20 minutes from the parking lot to the garage, be conscious of every turn. Instead of immediately putting on music and blocking out the world on a train ride to the next city, force yourself to be present in the train car, and notice the way the light reflects on the plastic seat two rows in front.

And to me, clarity in code, and in UX, is a part of this mindfulness. Programs that are easy to read, easy to modify, and easy to debug encourage you to look closer—to consider every atom that goes into their statements instead of taking them for granted. Slow algorithms that you understand can help you think of improvements; fast algorithms that you don’t encourage you to give up and leave the real thinking to someone else.

So write silly little shell scripts with five pipes in a single statement, and yes, that uselessly use cat. Rather than doing anything wrong—you’re allowing yourself and others to think, to try, and to improve.

[transgenderdoctorwhomst]

*looks at my schedule for the next three weeks* oh motherfucker

[florida3exclamationpoints]

Hang on thought about pastry arts school again

[go-go-devil]