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Comment by michaelt

I love the command line and use it all the time.

But let's be honest, the design is pretty esoteric.

You want to find a file containing a particular string? For some reason the tool is called 'grep'. The name is followed by '-r' then the search term, then the directory to start the search in.

And it won't be long before you start encountering tools with such intuitive names as 'sed' and 'awk' and 'crontab'

The tool for finding a file by name is better - that's called 'find' - except compared to grep the arguments are swapped: The directory to search is now the first parameter, not the last.

Oh, to find the *.desktop files on your system you did a find on / ? Yes, the messages like "find: ‘/proc/19917/fd’: Permission denied" are normal, you should ignore them. It's easy, simply add 2>/dev/null to the command.

Before you know it, the command line infects your brain and you start saying things like "sudo and nohup are perfectly good names"

parent michaelt 5 years ago

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