Subject:
Re: GNU Linux Tools Summary
From:
"Michael T Kerrisk" ####@####.####
Date:
12 Jul 2004 07:58:08 -0000
Message-Id: <24898.1089619061@www57.gmx.net>
Hi Gareth,
> "
> >I think the point here is that these are commands that _you_
> >might use now and then, but they are not on the everyday list
> >of tools used by people. TO be useful, your document needs
> >to be selective. Otherwise it's only a more useful than
> >typing "mak -k ."
> "
> Point taken, I will clean it up more, and I think I might end up making a
> editors cut or something similar for TLDP. (Depends on what I decide,
> either
> cut the document down a lot, which I'm more likely to do, or create 2
> versions, which I don't want to do).
Yes, I think the latter option is undesiarable also; conversely, I
would support a lot of trimming ;-).
> "
> >Going back -- I see one command in there that is regularly
> >useful to me: seq(1), for constructing for loops in shell scripts.
> <snip>
> >See my comment above. These are tools that _you_ might use, but they
> >are not of general interest (IMO, but I don't think I'd be alone in that
> >opinion).
> "
> Hmm, I was going to avoid bash programming commands, but I could add them
I do not mean that you should.
> (but I'm not too familiar with bash programming, and that would possibly
> be a section).
> Would you want that under mathamtical tools? Didn't people say remove it?
It's not essential. I was really just emphasising that there is only
one of those commands that I regulalrlyuse, and that was seq(1), and
as you see, it's only for shell scripting. I think it is right that
you avoid that. And yes, i said take out the math tools -- I don't
know if anyone else also expressed such an opinion.
> "
> >You snipped a question of mine -- and I think it cuts to the heart
> >of the problem with this document. To rephrase: what is your aim,
> >and how are you achieving it in the document?
> "
> Sorry, must have over-snipped :).
>
> My aim was originally to create a list of commands I found useful, I think
> I took the useful thing too far and rather than document whats practical I
> documented everything I considered useful.
>
> So I guess I should be aiming to document commands which are
> a) Useful or likely to become useful to the majority of users.
> b) Used by many users daily.
Well, frequently at least.
> Of course the decision will end up being my own, (yes everyone will have a
> different judgement on what is useful).
And that judegment should be based on experience and observation
of what many people do. See below.
> However what I would like is opinions on what is useful and what is not
> (well I think I'll be getting some from the reviewer, but if anyone has
> time to provide this kind of feedback it will be appreciated).
Well, I think you've been getting some of that already?
Now, someone already did something like this in this thread, but
I'll do my own version. I like to keep a nice long history -- 10000
lines or so -- so let's filter it a bit:
history | sed -e 's/^ *[0-9]* *//' | tr '|' '\012' | \
awk '{print $1}' | grep '^[a-zA-Z]' | sort | uniq -c | \
sort -k1nr > h
Then I edited 'h' to remove some of my aliases and other
irrelevant stuff, and pulled off the top 70 or so commands:
1780 grep
1239 cat
1065 cd
939 vi
930 ls
812 fg
700 man
407 wc
405 cc
230 make
181 sed
180 less
174 for
168 cp
149 su
142 rm
122 sort
119 find
113 jobs
102 mv
92 telnet
89 chmod
81 diff
81 egrep
76 tar
66 ps
62 ssh
58 bg
54 mkdir
50 netstat
38 history
37 df
35 pwd
32 od
32 touch
30 comm
30 du
30 tr
30 uniq
28 kill
26 awk
26 halt
26 ping
23 echo
23 jobs
21 file
19 strace
16 bunzip2
16 gdb
16 rpm
15 scp
14 stty
12 sleep
12 uname
10 bc
9 mount
7 head
7 tee
6 alias
6 script
6 whereis
5 ln
5 umount
4 rmdir
4 sh
3 date
3 edit
3 killall
3 nice
3 tail
3 which
3 yes
Looking at that list immediately reveals some of my biases:
1. I do a lot of C programming, so 'cc' (and probably 'vi' are
high on the list).
2. I not only read lots of man pages, I also patch them, so 'man'
is very frequent.
3. I grew up in the days before windowed workstations, so I
probably know and use job control much more than the average user.
(fg, bg, jobs).
4. I'm always looking at other people's source code (grep,
find, cat).
Of course the above list doesn't include use keyboard keys like ^Z,
^C, etc.
Now I don't claim the above list as being generally
representatitive, but I think it should be a start -- especially
if you could see what many other people's lists like this looked
like.
There is still the question: what differentiates your document
from existing HOWTOs?
I'll tell you one document that might have helped me a
little when I first started out: a selected list of
useful commands (not too long, but also not too short!), with a
brief explanation of what each does, and maybe one or two
examples. This might have more rapidlly given me an idea of
just what range of tools is available (gosh, the combination of
sort(1), grep(1), uniq(1), comm(1), is incredibly useful, and
even more so when you throw sed and awk (or perl if you must),
into the mix)and why I might use them, and then left me
inspired to look at the relevant man pages. (When I was
starting out, I used to look at all the one line headers from
man pages many times, just to get an idea of what was out there.)
But that's just me of course -- it's unclear to me quite if that's
what you mean to do. But I see that as one possible differentiator
from other HOWTOs. Of course it would be quite a bit of work.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
####@####.####
