Never learn Bash

Never learn Bash

I expect the future's hacker will never need to learn the following mainstays of Unix, if they start from childhood on a workflow centred on Emacs' Dired and Eshell.

Some "deprecated" commands:

  • cd
  • ls
  • tee
  • echo
  • sort
  • cut
  • ln
  • uniq
  • pwd
  • tr
  • awk / sed
  • cp / mv
  • rm / unlink
  • less / more
  • cat / tac
  • visudo / sudoedit
  • sudo / doas
  • head / tail
  • touch
  • time
  • chmod (though we're missing -R equivalent in dired)
  • chown (though we're missing -R equivalent in dired)

The deprecated categories seem to have to do with:

  • text munging
  • filesystem navigation
  • filesystem editing (i.e. renaming, moving, making directories, changing permissions…)
  • (re-)directing inputs and outputs
  • ?

Examples of commands we wouldn't deprecate (although you'll note many are amenable to a transient.el frontend which improves on them… in fact, it seems to me like you could partly automate the production of such frontends! And with that, I really question the immortality of shells.)

  • rsync
  • find / locate (though we'd use affe, helm and such frontends)
  • grep / ripgrep (though we'd use affe, helm and such frontends)
  • docker
  • guix
  • ip
  • nft
  • sysctl

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Created (2 years ago)