Command Line Life Partner Wanted

emj writes "Craiglist offers an interesting approach to finding a life partner , summmary: "There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." ... Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."

hmmm...

[hbean]

grep -i 'single white female' /usr2/home/women/*

Re:hmmm...

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

grep: /usr2/home/women/*: No such file or directory

*Sniff*

Re:hmmm...

[oliderid]

grep -i 'white female' /home/me/Desktop/women/*

1256 pictures found.

Re:hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

grep -i 'asian schoolgirl' /home/me/Desktop/women/*

*error insufficient memory

Re:hmmm...

[Sillygates]

grep -i 'asian schoolgirl' /home/me/Desktop/women/*

grep: argument list too long

Re:hmmm...

[rbowles]

xargs does the trick nicely here (and most versions of find expect arguments after the pathname).

# find ${SOMEPATH} -type f | xargs grep -i "${PATTERN}"

Re:hmmm...

[operagost]

Ok... this is exactly why you guys only have pictures of women.

Re:hmmm...

[rbowles]

Pictures?!?!?
I find a textual representation to be much more accurate and efficient. Certainly much easier to write an efficient parser for text than for a picture.

Re:hmmm...

[simcop2387]

its already been done, just take the video and play back with aalib or libcaca in mplayer!

Re:

[zippthorne]

Ugh, does no one read the man pages any more? Do people think they're sexist or something?

grep -r -i "${PATTERN}" ${SOMEPATH}

Correction on the find.

[rockhome]

# find ${SOMEPATH} -type f -exec grep -i "${PATTERN}" {} \;

Re:

[kbahey]

How did this get a +5?

You can do:

$ find ${SOMEPATH} -type f -exec grep -i "${PATTERN}" {} \;

Or:

$ grep -r -i "${PATTERN}"

Re:

[QuoteMstr]

Actually, modern versions of find (including GNU and OS X find) support this syntax. (Yes, it's standard.)


find "$PATH" -type f /bin/some-program {} +


Which works like the old print0/xargs -0 combination.

Also, ${FOO} is the same as $FOO. If you want to not cause whitespace-separated chunks to expand to multiple words, you must put the variable reference in double quotes.

Re:hmmm... Doesn't matter to them...

[davidsyes]

They are still living in a shell. (wink)

Re:hmmm...

[cruff]

I found this to be more correct:

% man woman
No manual entry for woman

Re:

[SQLGuru]

I think they prefer the mechanical entry.......bzzzzzzzz

Layne

Re:hmmm...

[spatialguy]

% make love
no target to make love

Re:hmmm...

[somersault]

basement# grep -i 'single white female' /usr2/home/women/*

Your mom

Something they won't say...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

"When we first met we just clicked."

Re:hmmm...

[ohtani]

ohtani@darkstar:~$ man woman
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Re:hmmm...

[malkavian]

root@SoupDragon:~/# man woman
No manual entry for woman

Which makes me wonder if the shell requirement is solely so he can make a Cron job and have automated entry?

Re:hmmm...

[Cerberus7]

You ran that as root? What are you, crazy? You might as well hand over your car keys and bank account numbers to her! Oh, wait, that happens anyway...

Re:hmmm...

[ResidntGeek]

Just a heads-up, it's generally considered improper to seek a wife from one's own home.

Try /pub.

Re:hmmm...

[antifoidulus]

Well, essentially he is looking for a device..... something he can input sperm into and get a baby as output, so probably /dev would be the best place to look. Though I don't know how many women have usb 2.0 compatible vaginas.

Re:

[glittalogik]

I think it's ok as long as the MTBF is high enough.

Re:hmmm...

[linguizic]

yoyhed@hell:~/# ./jackoff > /dev/sock

There, fixed that for you.

Re:

[yoyhed]

Hahaha! Very clever, but no one likes using a crusty /dev/sock.

Re:

[Malevolyn]

I know a girl named ALICE [alicebot.org] who's up for anything (as long as you've got the time to build some good training files). ;) And bonus, if you're freaky you can invite her cousin MegaHAL for a little two on one.

Unichs?

[Wordsmith]

Don't be silly. Unichs can't have children.

Re:Unichs?

[u-bend]

They're asexual. They respawn when killed.

Re:

[Brandybuck]

Eunichs is a trademark of Ball Labs®

Re:Unichs?

[dreamchaser]

That sound you just heard was the joke (a play on the words 'unix' and 'eunuchs') going WHOOOOOSH right over your Anonymously Cowardly head.

One things for sure

[clubhi]

This kid will get all the chicks.

"dying breed"?

[neiko]

I'm not sure I agree that shell users are a dying breed. Being a young developer (25yo) I and most, if not all, my co-workers are using a shell to develop and run unit debug/trace in. I think the amount of computer users in general has gone up so merely the ratio of shell/gui users has gone down.

Re:

[Mongoose Disciple]

Eh, it probably depends on the language/environment. People who do a lot of *NIX work probably shell a lot more than people who work more on Macs or Windows machines. (I know, the Mac gives you a bad ass command prompt, but I only know one Mac owner out of many that uses it at all.) I've worked at a pretty wide variety of companies (I'm a consultant, mostly .NET or Java work lately) and I'd say the developers that I've met that used the shell are vastly in the minority. Not to say there weren't occasion

Re:

[theCoder]

There are still some of us out there who use the command line and traces to debug. Partly because it's too much of a pain to compile everything debug and partly because I've never become proficient enough with dbx or gdb to make them my first choice.

Personally, I see the command line as my way to talk to the computer. Without it, I'm just pointing and grunting like a caveman. And if that's all you want, I guess that's OK, but I prefer the eloquence and expressiveness of the command line.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

Every professional programmer I've met who uses command line tools over GUI tools does it because they are working in an environment that lacks quality GUI tools

Another factor is that you can use the command line anywhere. I used to use a couple of GUI debuggers a lot, but when I was debugging my code on a remote machine via ssh (which I do fairly often) I was completely lost. Now I use gdb on both machines and there is no sharp loss in functionality when I switch to the command line. I can now do everything I used to do with the GUI debuggers (and a few things I didn't) in both local and remote environments. Sure, I could have run a GUI debugger over remote X

Re:

[putaro]

Hand me my command prompt. It's the one over there that says "Bad Motherfucker" on it.

bad_motherfucker>

Re:"dying breed"?

[Zach978]

I think that to some extent we are a dying breed. I'm only 23, and I'm still old enough that when I first started using a computer all we had was shell (dos, apple II). So I was forced to use CLI and am more comfortable using it as a result. My little brothers have never seen a shell...for them problems on a computer are fixed with lots and lots of clicking in the "control panel".

I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.

Re:"dying breed"?

[Vellmont]

I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.

I'd say that's because the CLI tools on windows aren't very good.

If I want to copy a file from one computer to another, it's a million times easier to use scp than it is to open up a GUI tool, drag the files around, etc. Same thing for changing file ownership of an entire directory.

Creating a user on the other hand is a lot easier using a GUI. I don't want to have to remember obscure, seldom used commands to assign the right groups, etc.

The mistake people seem to make is that it's an either/or choice. Shell or GUI? No, shell AND GUI.

Re:

[MightyMartian]

The vast majority of my programming over the years has been script and utility programming, so it's off to the CLI for that. Having been raised on old TRS-80s and Commodores, graduating into MS-DOS and Xenix, I'm afraid I find the GUI a bit of a pain. You use it because it's there, but if I want to do any non-trivial copying or the like, it's off to the command line.

I can't imagine using *nix without sh or bash. I still prefer CLI apps as well. I use SLRN for my newsreader, because I find it faster, mor

Re:"dying breed"?

[geminidomino]

Amen.

GUIs are for two things and two things only:

1. A container for multiple shell windows (slrn, irssi, mutt, etc..)
2. Using firefox to look at pictures of pretty women-type people.

Re:"dying breed"?

[soliptic]

Er, what?

Maybe YOU don't do any graphic design, video editing, audio production, etc; maybe all YOUR computer use is text-based stuff; I don't see how you can extrapolate that to a blanket statement of fact for the entire world.

Unless you know any graphic designers who use command line photoshop? > photoshop -select 50,101,40,50 -addtextlayer font:helvetica size:17pt antialiasing:crisp text:"Hello" -addlayerstyle styletype:bevel Much better. Right?

Or how about, say, ATC systems? I'm sure it's really easy to spot, at a glance, two planes getting too close for comfort when you're given an 80x25 screen full of numbers, as compared to a graphical representation.

Er... no... doesn't really work, does it. So your +4 insightful is... well... not.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

After all, who wants to waste precious clock cycles swapping out to refresh some widget?

Nah, CPU/RAM/Video card improvements render this point moot.
The real question is: Who wants to deal with vast amounts of UI library, tons of little form files, and intricate event models for managing all of the user state?
It's the 20% of the app taking 80% of the time, in addition to making all of that sweet logic you wrote kinda hard to use on multiple platforms.
UI stuff, while certainly important, can be some of th

Re:"dying breed"?

[rk]

And who-ever it was who thought tying computationally costly operations to fancy clock cycle consuming progress bars was a good idea should be shot.

Probably someone who was tired of the computational expense of having something run halfway through umpteen times, only to have their users kill the program, because it was "hung". If you've got a progress bar that's consuming enough CPU that it is having an significantly adverse impact on an application's performance, it's either coded horribly wrong, or you're at the very limit of your hardware's maximum capability, and perhaps you should really consider upgrading.

FWIW, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool shell scripting, C, Python and Perl programming command-line Unix elitist snob who uses X11 (or OS X for that matter) as little more than a fancy terminal manager, and have been for almost 20 years. But that doesn't mean I don't understand basic human factors.

I can't help you with Vista, I'm apparently lucky to never have used it. XP is more than adequate for my current Windows needs.

How they make children

[ORBAT]

who && gawk && uname && talk && date && wine && touch && unzip && strip && touch && finger && mount && fsck && more && yes; yes; more; yes; umount && make clean && sleep

Re:How they make children

[Anonymous Coward]

9 months later, fork() and spawn()

Re:How they make children

[$RANDOMLUSER]

You forgot "head".

...and "tail"

[Joce640k]

very important, that one...

Re:How they make children

[Mr. Underbridge]

who && gawk && uname && talk && date && wine && touch && unzip && strip && touch && finger && mount && fsck && more && yes; yes; more; yes; umount && make clean && sleep

See, that's just laziness. What about parallel threads, exception handling, and race conditions? ;)

Re:How they make children

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

> and race conditions

How can you post something like that on MLK day?

(I expect at least one mod point for not forcing a really clunky "I have a d-ram" joke...)

Re:

[iabervon]

"I have a dream that my four children will one day run on a system where they will not be judged by the ID of their group but by the locks that they hold."

Re:How they make children

[Anonymous Coward]

...and race conditions?

They have drugs to treat premature ejaculations now I think...

Not again

[Cheesey]

Don't fuck a mounted filesystem, or you will fsck everything up! For fsck's sake, call umount before fucking.

Saddening

[autocracy]

... that there is no e-mail there since being on the front page of /., he now stands a registerable chance of having that answered ;)

Any women in Maine for a 22 year old guy who also lives on the command line? I already know... no...

A UNIX relationship...

[hitchhikerjim]

Hmm... a relationship consisting of short, efficient and flexible commands that can be combined in interesting ways. Sounds pretty good to me. But I've only seen it work in the BDSM world.

Hey baby...

[Megane]

...wanna fork()?

Bah!

[Penguinisto]

Just fork and init FFS...

(what is this "mating" thing you speak of? It sounds as messy and inelegant as Visual Basic. Yuck).

(come to think of it, this may explain why there are so few shell users left...)

/P

his kids will tame him or suffer

[m0llusk]

Most people aren't command line geeks because they have no desire for that. If this person has kids and empowers them then they might become anything, but if this idea of spawning a kind of clone persists then the kids are likely to be constrained, unhappy, and ultimately failures at life.

Re:his kids will tame him or suffer

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a real hit at parties.

Re:

[lysse]

I think it's more that he tends to hit people at parties.

Re:

[daviddennis]

Perhaps he really does understand children as a sort of fork();? That call, as it happens, does create an identical child process!

This is an age-old problem and is not confined to computer geeks. Many fathers who want to "pass on their own line" have had similar problems.

Geeks tend to be more flexible than that, though - more so in practice than in theory. We're talking theory here so we can start as we want and then adopt to conditions.

I have to say he is truly looking at a tiny number of females likely

Re:

[Jugalator]

Hm, well I dunno... I read that thing as being written mostly tongue in cheek although he did seem to be looking for a girl on the geekier side who was interested in a dedicated relationship. But the rest seeming more like originality to stand out of the crowd. I don't think we should read too much into it, not that I'm a pro at analyzing these personal ads.

No graphical interface ...

[StripedCow]

Obviously, her looks are completely unimportant.

Re:No graphical interface ...

[niceone]

Obviously, her looks are completely unimportant.

Yeah, it's character based.

What?!

[jandersen]

What utter nonsense it this? The power and versatility of the UNIX shell(s) is exactly why I and many others choose to work with UNIX. In fact, I tend to work more and more in ksh - my X desktop is almost exclusively a handy way to have several xterms open. If I only had the gui, I would get next to nothing done.

He almost had me going...

[mr_gerbik]

Until I read this: I've been known to actually turn down offers of "two chicks at the same time."

Seriously though, I'd love to see the look on two girls' faces when this guy says, "Sorry ladies, I'm looking for a vi user, and you two look like you can't even use Word."

Re:

[calebt3]

He didn't mention the cup.

What a poser

[$RANDOMLUSER]

N.B. - on the issue of relocation. I live in a place where my income/expense ratio is proper (i.e., greater than 2:1). I'm willing to live anywhere in the world where this remains true.

As if. A real Unix geek would use a symbolic link.

The most Ironic thing

[techpawn]

They admit to being part of a "dieing breed" yet he is still looking for a mate? Darwin is spinning in his grave...

reminds me of this

[Mr. Slippery]

Reminds me of this old column by Joab Jackson [citypaper.com]:

Say you want to date a system administrator, or sysadmin for short. (And why wouldn't you? They rake in the phat bux for maintaining office computer networks.) The choice is clear: Go for someone specializing in Unix, not Windows. The Unix sysadmin may be slothful and go missing for entire weekends on a Dungeons and Dragons binge. But it's the Windows sysadmin who'll unwittingly hose you with a dangerous virus. And that's far worse.

What, you might ask, could the operating system a person chooses to spend time with possibly reveal? Everything...Windows is designed for people who don't want to spend a lot of time fooling with their computers. It simplifies tasks, giving us pretty boxes to point and click at.

...

Think about these qualities for a sec. Which would you rather have in a lover? Who would you rather have as an intimate -- someone who takes time to understand your quirks thoroughly, or someone who merely pushes your buttons whenever you malfunction? I'm not saying all Windows NT people are obedient, shallow half-wits driven only by desire for material gain. I'm just saying that if you want to fish a decent specimen from the dating pool, you might be better off starting on the Unix side.

I only see one problem...

[Valar]

I was quite sure that many women out there would find the ad very intriguing, until he got to the part about only using Vi. Seriously, why would you bring up your mental health conditions even before the first date?

Intelligent atheist white man seeks sweetie

[nuxx]

Don't forget the other UNIX-y posting where an Intelligent atheist white man seeks sweetie [craigslist.org].

Re:Intelligent atheist white man seeks sweetie

[ggvaidya]

And in case you were wondering, yes, it's authentic [stallman.org].

If he finds such a woman...

[jollyreaper]

He will have to propose. I wonder if he's going to go with diamond or a token ring?

ONE child?

[Jesus_666]

He wants ONE child? Okay, so either he doesn't want his family to go anywhere or his grasp of the Unix way is very light. Of course he needs MANY children, each good at one and only one thing:

One child can read and write.
One child can do math.
One child knows how to operate a car.
And so on.

Then, in order to do anything useful he pipes together the children. That's the proper Unix way of founding a family.

Re: Good at only one thing

[Dareth]

reading and writing is definitely more than one thing.

You would need a whole team of children to operate a car, and even then you should avoid "race conditions"!

How this could end up...

[E-Lad]

[daleg@home]~$ ./significant-other
Reading configuration from ~/.sorc...
Welcome to GNU Significant Other! It's Monday, January 21, 2008:

   -- It is trash night.
   -- It is recycling night.
   -- Fault in dishwasher water supply was detected on 1/19/2008. Please address by 1/23/2008
   -- "Poker Night" appointment in calendar observed. This conflicts with "Movie with kids"
   -- Snow is predicted tomorrow during the evening. Please ready sho
^Z
[1]+  Stopped       ./significant-other
[daleg@home]~$

Re:How this could end up...

[Alioth]

[reiser@home]~$ kill -9 %1
[1]+ Killed ./significant-other
[reiser@home]~$ _

Re:

[geminidomino]

But funny. :)

Re:

[Nimey]

Hans, settle down.

I can just hear it now!

[techpawn]

Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."

Mom: There's something billy wants to say to you dear...
Dad: What is it son?
Son: Well, ever since I was young I knew I was different... Not like the other boy you wanted me to play with and...
Dad: Billy? Are you telling us you're gay?
Son: No! Not that dad...
Dad: Well son what is it?
Son: I've been dual booting XP for weeks now! I want to use a GUI!
Dad: WHAT?!! I have no son!

Re:I can just hear it now!

[xtracto]

Yes training a child a birth to use a command line is no promise they will grow up using it... Especially growing up and realizing the GUI have some major advantages over command lines for Many uses....

The problem with GUIs is that they are not practical, at least not the ones that are created. I just have had to calculate about 500 Shapiro-Wilk statistics and p-values using R (statistical analysis package), I use Rkward GUI because it make things a whole lot easier, however, it would be plainly stupid to try to calculate all those values (from series with about 1000 samples) by importing, and selecting the statistics via a menu, it would have taken hours.

Instead, a simple Bash script using awk, sed, grep and a custom prgoram to run R scripts allowed me to make it automatically *and* to format the results in a way I liked.

GUIs are *easy* to use, but they are very impractical. It would be a nice argument to prove if all of them are like that or if it is only that GUIs are usually made that way (i.e., the irfanView batch converting is really good! and easy compared to some linux command line equivalents... and there is no Linux GUI equivalent of that).
 

Sid, Is that you?

[Technician]

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20011229&mode=classic [userfriendly.org]

In The Beginning Was The Command Line

[ahodgkinson]

http://www.spack.org/wiki/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine [spack.org]
And somebody help me find the essay about the command line vs. GUI environments, where the author rants about how inefficient GUIs are for development work. It may have been written by Larry Wall or somebody like him.

Vista has a great command prompt

[LM741N]

Shift-Right click will bring up a shell anywhere, even on the desktop. I've been using it to install the Enthought Tool System (ETS) and it works great. I know there used to be a Powertoy that did this but I don't think it was as powerful.

I also use the prompt for burning bootable DVD's. I download Server Tools and use the dvdburn.exe utility. Shells are on their way back.

Re:Vista has a great command prompt

[garnetlion]

I feel so, so dirty envying a Vista feature. I'm sure I could configure Gnome to do the same, but I don't feel good about myself right now.

Feminist Unix command

[InterGuru]

man bash

Command Line Users: The new Amish?

[dreamchaser]

I can see it now...colonies of geeks will spring up all over that are only allowed to marry each other and can't use any computer technology developed after 1986.

Two Girls...

[Edward Teach]

Ok, so the only reason he turned down two girls is because they only had one cup between them...

Not the stupidest way to find a spouse

[Qbertino]

Two people accustomed to often using the Unix CLI for their work/passion are likely to have a lot in common, as using the CLI a) really isn't that common and b) requires a measurable amount of intelligence and mental flexibility combined with precision and foresight.
A specialty like unix cli usage really isn't the worst measurement for finding a partner for life. It definitely holds more water that looks or brand of car.

When I had kids, I really tried getting the wife

[way2trivial]

to agree to allow me to teach them binary math first.. I wanted to teach them how to count to 1023 on their fingers (4, 128, and 132 are a scream)
I gotta lotta hell no.. but imagine it-- if your kids intuitively knew binary-- or hex-- imagine the abilitys for a future programmer..

Linux sex

[gringer]

I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix.

Here's one way to do it on Linux:

gawk; chat; look; nice; date; wine; grep; touch; play; unzip; strip; touch; expand; screen; finger; screen; latex; tangle; mount; fsck; more; yes; yes; yes; yes; screen; yes; yes; yes; more; yes; yes; umount; sleep

this is...

[sentientbrendan]

>PS - yes, this is for real.

I'm sorry, but this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Wanting more people to use the command line is not a suitable justification for bringing a new human being into the world. It certainly is not the basis for a healthy relationship.

It's true that all sorts of people who aren't qualified to reproduce do so anyway. Just be aware that you are in that group.

Also, no, just knowing what KSH is doesn't guarantee you have prime genetic material.

Re:

[Keruo]

> A modern computing system is not one that is run from the DOS commandline

Windows 2008 server core is not modern enough for you then? It is run from DOS(actually powershell) commandline.

Re:Don't live in the dark ages!

[msuarezalvarez]

A modern computing system is not one that is run from the DOS commandline

The DOS command line did not run a modern computing system not even when it was first released.

Re:Obvious Fake

[Jellybob]

I know you're joking, but its time to fight the "geeks can't get laid" stereotype.

I don't know if I'm just not in the truly geeky end of the spectrum, but certainly in the area of "professional geeks" (developers, sysadmins, network admins etc.) I know very few who are single, and most of the ones who are don't have much trouble finding women, they just can't really be bothered with the dating game.

There was once a time when geeks were kinda freaky people you'd steer clear of, but that seems to have changed as more people get computers and an Internet connection, and start to find out that we were right about it being useful all along. Sure, it's still almost impossible to explain the job of a software developer to the average computer user, but then I can't comprehend what a professional accountant must do all day.

Re:

[techpawn]

Then admit you're just in it for the sex and suck it up little soldier!

Re:Obvious Fake

[Ilan Volow]

A real sysadmin would simply pipe one chick into the other.

Re:Geek Dating Service ... Requirements?

[mattwarden]

Please add the following requirements:

* Women

This will be the toughest feature to implement.