Indeed:

https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/SUDO_1_9_9/plugins...

But this particular message was removed in sudo 1.9.10:

https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/commit/6aa320c96a376136

It boils down to the same issue. Whether you store data or not, your brain is a bottle eck. And managing notes would require the same skill as curating your efforts.

I've also had this happen, but never figured out the solution.

This is especially frustrating because your question is likely to pop up first in your search results because you probably phrase things the same way even years later!

Your first point is fair too. Commands are useless if nobody documents their usage.

Physically writing things has been a useful tool to increase recall for a long time. Taking notes in class may be more helpful than reviewing them later.

Certainly, quick access to information with a small search query helps tune our brains to get small search queries, but do some filing for a day or three and your brain will get tuned to quick recall there too. In the old days, you'd get real familiar with certain parts of books.

I suspect our brains have always been better at remembering meta-information than information itself. E.g. where you last saw an item of clothing vs the configuration of colours on it. In most cases this makes sense, and is essentially a space-saving trick, but there must be some point at which the meta-info becomes too inaccessible or too slow to utilise that remembering the full detail directly becomes worthwhile. Convincing your brain of that before it becomes too late can be a regular challenge with so much readily available externally stored information.

Funny, I always reason about the 3+ argument form... For example, what does ln -s foo bar baz do? Well it can't create a foo symlink that points to bar AND baz, but it could create multiple symlinks - bar and baz - that point to the file foo. Therefore the first arg is the file you want to point to, and the rest of the arguments are symlinks you want to create (of which there happens to usually only be one).

Edit: this line of reasoning works for common usage of a lot of other utils too, like zip/tar etc. Even grep - is it grep FILE PATTERN [PATTERN ...] or grep PATTERN FILE [FILE ...] ?

This is confusing, because when you picture the link as an arrow (as in `ls` output), the link name is the source and the link target is the destination.

In my opinion, the EXAMPLES section should be near the top of the man page and include the most common usages.

I love tldr for this https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

How so?

I remember the times before I learned Bash and the Unix userland. Those where dark times. I was stuck on Windows 98, which I really didn’t like. It just felt so needlessly crippled. When I discovered Bash, Debian, the Unix way, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

These days I’m on macOS. And one of the best things about it is that it’s a great desktop operating system, with a Unix under the hood. The userland Apple ships is quite dated, but that’s easily solvable by installing GNU Coreutils etc via Homebrew.

nah. learning unix was fun. having all the documentation online and in an easily called up and consistent format made it possible. microcomputer operating systems didn't have things like "man -k" and while we can complain all day here till we're blue in the face about small quirks, it was light-years beyond the crap that was going on in microcomputer operating systems.

even when doing windows or embedded development with tools like visual studio or wrs tornado, i've always insisted on having mkl or cygwin for command line tasks.

i'm enjoying seeing the variety in everyone's mnemonics :)

To expand on this, people needlessly cargo-cult arcane dd commands, but on many (most?) systems, "cp foo.iso /dev/sdb" will do the same thing, but with possibly even better performance!

What would you recommend as an alternative for disk imaging in Linux? I'm in the process of migrating a herd of PCs from HDDs to SSDs and would appreciate suggestions.

I have a notesfile on how to fix/debug things. When I started it, I would write things down after I fixed something and figured I'd need to remember it later.

Problem was, I would often forget to write things down, or naively think "that was quick to find out, don't need to write it down", which is a classic mistake of confusing post-facto mindset with pre-facto.

So now when I wonder how to do a thing, I first write down in my notesfile what my question is, so when I do resolve it I go and write down the answer to satisfy my need for closure.

this is why I have made it a point these days that when I fix an issue, I immediately go to all the forums, subreddits and stackoverflow sites where I posted the question and post the relevant solution. Its a lot of work but totally beats figuring out what you did 6 months later

That’s just karma. I have tried not to do that to myself because so many others have done it to me. Still, sometimes the answer I left is too vague to be practical.

I make a habit of turning every question I have, that I don't find an answer to in 30 min, a question AND answer on stackoverflow/stackexchange

And many times, even years later, when I google the answer, I google my name, stackoverflow, and the topic, and kapow - answer received :D

Somewhere in the middle. Hopefully not while sharpening the axe or staring into the well.

There’s plenty of opportunity to ponder one’s own existence while chopping wood and carrying water. Or to listen to a podcast.

Just notice it.

It fits between the kama used to harvest rice and the comma used to separate those thoughts.

Somewhere in the middle

I don't mind the slightly different versions, that's what documentation and SO is for. I mind the language being a garbage kludge of organically-grown syntax and semantics, with not the slightest hint of a single principle or a unifying idea. And I mind that the vast majority of interfaces to it from a general purpose PL is fucking around with strings like a caveman, instead of a typed, IDE-assisted, first-class representation as a full-blown language construct or mix of constructs

been recently learning Python in earnest. Coming from Perl, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, etc. I'm just dumbfounded. How on earth did Python's regex library get to be so bad? It's like it was designed by people that were figuring out how regexes worked as they went along but must have skipped the part about modifiers, how anchoring works, etc. No wonder so many people hate regexes. The ironic part is Python's "one obvious way to do it" zen thing. It has like 5 different ways to do the same thing with a regex whereas Perl, the "more than one way to do it" camp has simple and obvious ways to do everything with regex. I love regex in Perl. In Python I don't want to touch it ever again. Even JavaScript is miles better.

I agree. I actually have a pretty strong understanding of regexes and use them regularly (for editing, not so much in code), but I despise how every editor/language does them subtly different.

Though if you include the dash to use those as flags, the second one is wrong (it treats the "v" as the file name for "f"). Without the dash, the next positional argument is the file name.

Examples: These do the same thing:

  tar cfv foo.tar a b c
  tar cvf foo.tar a b c
  tar -cvf foo.tar a b c

This errors, trying to add foo.tar to archive v:

  tar -cfv foo.tar a b c

Even easier: tar --help

I'd say the easiest way to remember the argument order is that it's conceptually the same as for mv and cp: ln -s x y is the closest possible symlink-analogue of cp x y.

> logically, the source must be the first one!

You mean the target, but that isn’t a logically necessary consequence at all. Conceivably, `ln` could support the following two syntaxes:

  ln [options] target
  ln [options] link_name target

The way I remember the correct parameter order is that I remember it’s the non-intuitive one.

I remember this as "ln=long -s=short $long $short" as in "ln -s $long $short" creates a $short file pointing to $longfile. But to your point, $short is defaulted to basename($long).

The other way to think about it is that it's the same order as cp.

Finally! Somehow I've never been able to remember that either.

Surely the intuitive order for mutating assignment is value → name, though...

You contradict yourself here.

> (A) Modern computers run on electricity [not ones and zeroes]

> (B) one could build a computer out almost anything that lends itself to both being on and off

You got it right in B, which is exactly the point when people say computers are just 1s and 0s. Computers are a mathematical concept, not just some electrical device, as you seem to claim in A. The fact that you can build a computer out of water or air pressure or Minecraft Redstone is exactly the point people are making when they say they're built up from 1s and 0s (not electricity, not silicon and copper, not Redstone).

Is 1 indicative of current flowing? Or not flowing? Is that consistent with a given chip, let alone an entire system? Is it always DC current, or can it be AC? In fact, is the 1 represented by current, voltage, and/or frequency?

There's lots of different answers here in different contexts. The reason 1s and 0s are good is because they represent the information in the digital domain, not the implementation in the analogue.

I recall trying to explain how hard drives worked to a guy who didn’t believe me, it was weird because he had aspirations of being a hacker some day. He got really mad “math is math” style when we explained they are analog rounded to binary and that’s why disk erasers exist and take so long (and this was before they got really paranoid).

Then people kept wandering up and agreeing with me and by the end it was practically an intervention.

> 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science

Long before standing for true or false, 1 and 0 have stood for the presence or absence of something arbitrary, so I don't see any issue here.

It still functions like an abacus.

Because I have seen so many laypeople operate off the misconstrued idea that computers literally work like that!

Granted, many of these people have been around since before typewriters and phones were a common thing, but the ”1s and 0s” explanation does not offer anything tangible for people who cannot see the trees from the forest (sic), and thus it only widens the ”digital divide”.

You're probably going to have trouble finding an average car driver that can explain to you how automatic transmission works.

> Imagine if people generally understood that automobile combustion engines work by ”combusting fuel” without knowing anything more about their car.

No need to imagine.