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on 29 August 2006 (#11024369)

Unixish - Solving problems the UNIX way

Select Members , Moderated

"This is the Unix philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."

-- Doug Mcllroy

unixish is for people that appreciate the above philosophy and want to delight in using it to solve a series of weekly problems for fun and educational purposes!

A problem will be posted every week and members will be challenged to solve it using the canonical UNIX tools1 in the most simple and elegant way. The intention isn’t to necessarily come up with the shortest solution (as in Perl Golf say) rather clarity and simplicity wins. For the simple reason that if something is expressed in simple terms it’s easier to understand and reuse.

Hopefully as people partake in challenges their command-line prowess will grow and fun will be had. Even lurkers or people new to UNIX should learn a new thing or two from following the problems and their corresponding solutions.

[1] Basically see the tools listed in the userinfo. Let me know if you think there's an essential tool missing but please feel free to submit solutions of the Perl one-liner kind since they're fun and useful just not the preference here. :) And of course, there may be slight discrepances arising from different versions of tools but I don't forsee that to be something that comes up too often! When it does it will be resolved... somehow

animate, awk, bash, cat, cd, chmod, chown, clarity, cmp, comm, composition, conjure, convert, cp, cut, date, dd, df, diff, dir, display, diversity, echo, economy, ed, elegance, emacs, everything is a file, ex, extensibility, false, file, filters, find, finger, ftp, generation, grep, head, identity, imagemagick, import, least surprise, less, links, ls, lynx, mail, minimalism, mkdir, mknod, modularity, mogrify, montage, more, optimisation, parsimony, patch, perl, pipes, printf, processes, ps, pwd, python, redirection, regular expressions, repair, representation, rm, rmdir, robustness, ruby, scripts, sed, separation, sh, shell, silence, simplicity, sleep, sort, split, ssh, stat, su, sync, tail, tcsh, tee, telnet, test, touch, tr, transparency, tree, true, uname, uniq, unix, vdir, vi, w, wget, who, xargs, yes, zsh