Interview With the Author of "Mastering Cat"

Shlomi Fish writes "O'Reilly is publishing a new book titled 'Mastering cat,' about the UNIX 'cat' command. Here is an interview O'Reilly-Net conducted with the author about it. Read it to see if this book should be part of your bookshelf of technical books."

How about the followup?

[Fittysix]

?tac gniretsam

I tried mastering cat.

[SuperBry]

But I kept on getting scratched...

Re:How about the followup?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd prefer the follow up "Mastering Pussy"

Re:Frist Psot?

[snowraver1]

There is, but it only works if you are logged in as AC and if you post either a goatse pic, a long post about Obama's shit, or an instruction manual for someone of african decent.

How hard is it to get CAT to work with HURD?

[TinBromide]

I've been trying to get my cat to play nice with gnu Hurd for a while. It seems like it starts to work, but then starts to ignore all IO and proceeds to SLEEP(3600). I am eagerly awaiting someone who can get a cat Hurd to work.

O HAI

[Oxy the moron]

I CAN HAZ DIS BOOK NOW PLZ??

Re:I am not reading any more Slashdot until

[Em Emalb]

Dear Sir or Madame, (if you are a madame, please respond with little black book, kthxbai)

Your frustration with the article posting selection with regards to the date of April 1st, 2009 has been noted.

Please understand that the most amusing thing to the majority of us is people who come to a site VOLUNTARILY on today's date knowing full well that the site will be filled with goofy articles and comments, some amusing, most not. However, your apparent frustration has been duly noted and will be filed with the appropriate authorities. Please be patient, as it can take up to several leap years for your complaint to be handled.

Have a pleasant day, and for God's sake, upgrade to a current gaming console, this isn't 1986.

Yours,

Cletedius P Moran
HMFIC
Slashdot Complaints Department
1st Marine Forces Expeditionary Unit
Baghdad, Iraq
888-867-5309

In the news today, a group of IT professionals ...

[Phizzle]

were found dead. Apparently they were playing a drinking game, and doing a shot for every lolcats reference on Slashdot.

Re:How hard is it to get CAT to work with HURD?

[mrogers]

The trick to controlling a cat Hurd is pipes... lots of pipes.

Neuter to decrease aggression

[wonmon]

rm -r testes

Still Waiting

[Kushieda Minorin]

I'm still waiting for "Mastering true" and "Mastering false". The delay is understandable, considering nobody is able to harness the true power of these two commands.

Re:O HAI

[Bob The Cowboy]

I CAN HAZ DIS BOOK NOW PLZ??
--

Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.

I knew it... lolcats is a grassroots movement started by the Libertarians to... uhh... get... cheezeburgers?

I'm more intersted in tail than cat.

[Maxo-Texas]

If they released a book on how to master tail (heck, even find tail), it would change slashdot forever.

Re:How about the followup?

[lord_rob the only on]

rob@thinkpad:~$ pussy
bash: pussy: command not found

rob@thinkpad:~$ man pussy
No manual entry for pussy

Pussy doesn't even exist ...

Here goes:

[IceCreamGuy]

~# date
Wed Apr 1 13:31:50 EDT 2009
~# links2 -dump http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] >> humortest.txt
~# cat humortest.txt | grep $somethingfunny
~#

Talk to the guys at

[wiredog]

EDS [youtube.com].

Re:I use...

[Tetsujin]

...Schroeder's cat. If it works, you don't know it, but if it doesn't you have to try again until you get it to work (if you can tell that it worked anyway). Then the pipe comes out to stop my mind frying.

That's "Schrodinger's cat". Your license to make quantum mechanics jokes is hereby revoked. To make sure you don't try to take your license back, we're going to keep you updated on its current velocity.

Re:Neuter to decrease aggression

[kg9ov]

The cat probably won't be as open to that as you may think... I would suggest using the -f option as well, just to be sure.

Re:I'm more intersted in tail than cat.

[drooling-dog]

That would be useful. And if there was one on mastering head, I'd buy it for the GF...

Re:I use...

[eXonyte]

Funny, I never realized that Schroeder [wikipedia.org] had a cat...

Upcoming second edition in 2012

[Tetsujin]

The second edition of "Mastering Cat" will include in-depth coverage of the use of "cat" in the new generation of object-oriented Unix shells. Key topics will include:

• "cat" type safety
• Using "cat" in traditional mode vs. object-oriented
• "cat" pitfalls: attempting to run "cat" on non-serializable live objects, "cat" on lists vs. "cat" on text files, using "cat" to capture user input (and dealing with the untyped data stream that results...)

You think I'm joking? Watch me. Hopefully what I come up with won't be quite the nightmare I'm trying to describe above. :D

Re:How about the followup?

[h4rm0ny]

Pussy doesn't even exist ...

That's strange. When I try:

h4rm0ny@mybox~$ grep -r pussy *

I get lots and lots of results.

But...

[cstdenis]

it's not even Caturday yet.

Re:How about the followup?

[cayenne8]

Too bad there isn't a Unix command "Bater".....I'm sure that would be his next book.

:)

I think it would tend to be more of a self help book than a technical tome though...

Re:Frist Psot?

[cayenne8]

"What is this "African Decent" you speak of? :)"

Well, it is like regular Descent [wikipedia.org], except rather than flying through caves, you are flying through a dry, arid desert area. And rather than lasers and smart bombs, you get a spear. If lucky, you get a power up weapon of a coke bottle that comes to you from the gods in the sky.

In case you were wondering what the book's like...

[Anonymous Coward]

here's a what a simple cat implementation looks like (The book leeaves additional features as an exercise to the reader):

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAZ A VAR
MAEK ARGV[1] A TROOF, O RLY?
  YA RLY, VAR R ARGV[1]
  NO WAI, VAR R "STDIN"
OIC
PLZ OPEN FILE VAR?
  AWSUM THX
      IM IN YR FILE EATING UR LINES
    VISIBLE LINES
      IM OUTTA UR FILE
  KTHX
  O NOES
      INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

Re:How about the followup?

[oldspewey]

No manual entry for pussy

I think I see the problem here - try starting her off with 3 or 4 vodka appletinis.

Re:Neuter to decrease aggression

[upside]

How do you remove testes recursively? Are cat testes like Russian dolls? If so, is this somehow related to them having nine lives? Perhaps it makes sense. To kill a cat with any certainty you'd have to do something like

kill -9 $(ps axe | cut -d" " -f1 | tail -1 | head | cat)

which - as we know - is an arcane Unixish incantation to kill the cat by putting it in a bag and cutting somewhere between the tail and head with an axe nine times.

Or maybe you meant rm -f

P.S. I take no responsibility if you're stupid enough to run that command. Anything or nothing could happen.

Re:Here goes:

[IceCreamGuy]

I know, I wrote that all out, and then I was like "wait, shit, I can just grep it right from the links2 output." So I wrote it on one line... but then I realized I wasn't using cat anymore and it ruined the joke. Please don't judge me!

P.S. thanks for introducing me to the phrase "UUOC," now I have something funny to read!

Re:Neuter to decrease aggression

[Zashi]

Parent's command only works after you touch testes

Re:I'm more intersted in tail than cat.

[Just Some Guy]

Alternatively, you could master head. I hear there's demand for it in certain log processing circles.

Wrong cover

[dlsmith]

O'Reilly would never put a picture of a cat on a book about "cat". It's way too [oreilly.com] obvious [oreilly.com]. (Well, nevermind [oreilly.com].)

Re:Frist Psot?

[Scott Francis[Mecham]

Does the bottle need to be returned at the end of the game, though? Or is that a bonus mission?

Re:I'm more intersted in tail than cat.

[fwice]

>---joke--->

   O
  \|/    <--- you
  / \

WHOOSH

Re:Neuter to decrease aggression

[wonmon]

Honestly, I used rm -r because I was thinking that ball1 and ball2 (and sometimes ball3) would be subdirectories, each containing millions of incomplete cat executables.

Misreading Title (was:I tried mastering cat)

[Anonymous Coward]

But I kept on getting scratched...

That's probably because you misread the title as masturbating when it should have been mastering. (Sorry, it had to be said.)

Re:How about the followup?

[palegray.net]

pparadis@alpha:~$ vodka
bash: vodka: command not found
pparadis@alpha:~$ appletini
bash: appletini: command not found
pparadis@alpha:~$ tequila
bash: tequila: command not found
pparadis@alpha:~$ liquor
bash: liquor: command not found
pparadis@alpha:~$ beer
The program 'beer' is currently not installed.
You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install gerstensaft
bash: beer: command not found

Wow, I'm off to install beer on my laptop now.

Re:How about the followup?

[jonbryce]

pussy does exist, however there is no documentation for it, so you have to figure it out for yourself.

The other thing is, it isn't in $PATH, and slocate doesn't index it, so finding it is an exercise in itself.

Re:Neuter to decrease aggression

[megaditto]

Inside the testes are smaller cats with smaller testes... In fact, it's the ever-shrinking copies of cats with testes all the way down.

Re:I use...

[Tetsujin]

That's "Schrodinger's cat". Your license to make quantum mechanics jokes is hereby revoked.

That's Schrödinger's cat. Your licence to use Latin characters outside the 7-bit ASCII range is hereby revoked.

Well, I don't have a license to use Latin characters outside the 7-bit ASCII range - which accounts for why I didn't. :D

But, still, touche. (D'oh! I did it again!)

Re:Here goes:

[curunir]

You must not have gotten to the chapter entitled "Advanced Cat" (page 2). Cat can also be used as a target for piped output.

Try: ~# wget -o /dev/null -O - http://www.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] | cat | cat | cat | grep $somethingfunny
~#

Voila! No temp file needed. And all due to the power of cat (hint: the third one is the most important.)

obscurix

[sbeckstead]

I tried
schroedinger>mkdir /box
then
schroedinger>mv cat /box
Then when I went to look in /box
schroedinger>ls /box I found two files...
cat cat.dead
it's not in the manual...