Recently, I’ve taken it upon myself to bone up on my Unix. I keep a Terminal window open on my Macintosh, and I’ve been plowing through the Propeller-Head books, discovering more about how Unix works, honing my shell scripting techniques, and discovering all sorts of wonderful and powerful things the World’s Best Computer Operating System can do.
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\nI’ve you’ve read my blog posts for the past (Gads! Has it been?) five years, then you know I’m an old fogey when it comes to using computers. I enjoy the command prompt. Obviously Unix and I are headed toward a torrid love affair.<\/p>\n
There is a command prompt (DOS or Terminal) window open on just aboute every computer that encircles me. It’s just that there are many, many handy things you can do at the command prompt that would take too much time to do in a graphical environment like Windows.<\/p>\n
Take the recent mega-post I did on the While I’m enjoying reviewing and learning new Unix terminal commands, occasionally they do get in the way: Whenever I switch over to my writing computer I’m faced with a DOS prompt (the CMD window). Instead of typing The problem with typing You can learn a few things from this lesson. First, appreciate how much DOS was despised back in the day; the error message doesn’t explain much. Second, at least it’s a better error message than the original robocopy<\/code> command. Please!<\/p>\nDIR<\/code> to list a directory, I type ls<\/code>, which is the Unix command that does the same thing.<\/p>\nls<\/code> instead of DIR<\/code> at the C:><\/code> prompt?<\/p>\n'ls' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
\noperable program or batch file.<\/code><\/p>\nBad command or filename<\/code>. Third, obviously Microsoft doesn’t believe in the serial comma.<\/p>\n