I started a new work site last week and I must say its going to take a little getting used to. I’m on site with the customer now, so things are less flexible than before, but hopefully the work will turn into something I like. UNIX is a staple around here, so learning that is the order of the day. You can probably expect me to blather about it off and on here during the next few weeks.
I’ve decided that Andrew Peterson is probably the best new songwriter I’ve heard in a very long time. He has the same heart felt poetic touch that Rich Mullins had, and in some ways speaks more to me because he speaks from a younger perspective. His focus on family and his succint descriptions of faith and love and hope have my heart stirred. It has been a long time since I’ve felt that kind of depth in music that I didn’t hear from a hymnal. Thanks Andrew.
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I completely agree with you. Andrew Peterson’s music is incredible. One of my favorites is “Nothing To Say.”
The mark of a really good poet is that he is able to capture the entirety of a specific experience. The emotions and the depth are fully conveyed through the particular use of language. Its a feat I am always very impressed with, and that though I strive to accomplish, rarely achieve.
I just bought his new cd tonight. Wow.
Good luck learning Unix, Man. I love it!
I hated it when I first learned it in college- having to memorize all those stupid arcane commands, but now that I use it all day every day I’ve come to appreciate it greatly.
Windows is basically an OS you use just to run applications. Unix is an OS you can use as an application. AWK, SED, shell scripting- you can do anything! And once you get used to it, you realize VI is very powerful and useful.
I’m no super-ace, but if you have any UNIX questions, send me an email, I know a few who are super-aces.
I’ve never commented here before, but I’m a fairly regular reader. Keep writing and I’ll keep reading.
UNIX is the high-water mark for operating systems, though it’s inevitable that it will be replaced with something better (but similar) someday.
Here’s the beauty of UNIX and *NIX-based operating systems like Linux or BSD: EVERYTHING is a file. It doesn’t matter if it’s a CD-RW, a SCSI device, a tape drive, or some sort of odd peripheral. UNIX treats those things as files, which makes them easy to set up.
I don’t know why people coming from a DOS/Windows environment get so shook up when confronted with *NIX. I tell people like that, “well, can you edit a file and save it?” Most people nod their heads “yes” to that one. If you can edit a config file, you can handle UNIX or Linux.
The way the filesystem is laid out, like an upside-down tree, is a thing of logical beauty, with the root (/) directory the base of the tree and the hallowed-by-usage /usr, /bin, /etc forming the branches.
I’m as fond of comand line as the next guy, and I know that the stability and speed of UNIX based systems is unparralleled, but here is my complaint. It’s not the structure, although that takes a bit of time to get used to, and its not the ecintricity of the commands, although those do make for some confusion if you’ve never delt with them before, and its not over abundance of shells, though trying to keep track of what is what adds further to the experience, and it isn’t the horrific state of the GUI’s available to most unix boxes, although that makes for irritations galore when you’re used to the refined tastes of Windows XP. What really makes working with UNIX a pain is the fact that the prompt doesn’t tell me where I am, and programming the prompt to tell me where I am is a royal pain. *grin*
Its like waking up to discover you have an extra set of appendages. Sure, those appendages will come in handy I’m sure, but in the meen time I have to buy a whole new wardrobe, and figure out how to walk and crawl and pick up things all over again. I was highly productive in the windows environment. It has most of the things you have in UNIX, including a scripting engine and a full featured scripting language. Choose your language of choice, javascript, vbscript, or perl. Granted, you can’t awk or grep or pipe. Those are big losses if you are used to scripting everything. If you grow up in UNIX, you don’t have any problems understanding intrinsically how things work. But switching to UNIX after years of work and study in Windows is like trying to learn Chinese when you’re in your thirties. Sure its possible, but it isn’t easy and gosh if those tones just fly right over your head most of the time.
Sorry I didn’t see this sooner, but there’s an easy way to solve that problem.
The command pwd “print working directory” will tell you where you are. Hate typing that over and over again, or you can’t be bothered with scrolling backward over the command history?
Assuming you are running the bash shell, enter this command at the prompt to customise the prompt itself:
$ PS1=”u w –> “
Voila!
Normally I use csh, and I don’t think that syntax will work, but I’ll try it out, and see if I can’t figure something out for csh.
need to know how to get my backup disk to start windows