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Message Posted: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 @ 21:40:52 GMT

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My advice: give yourself a present and embark on a good study of Unix. I don't mean a three-day training or some such but a nice old-fashioned self-study with a good book, Internet resources, and a lot of exercises.

You see, the thing with Unix is that it was developed by a bunch hackers (40 years ago), and they were very good in operating systems but their style was very personal and they did not care much about the presentation. Hence, all these strange commands and different results the same script can generate when run on different systems, or even on the same system when run by users with different "profiles". Very irritating for beginners.

But another thing about Unix is that it is a wonderful system once you start speaking its language and following its conventions. It is still fun to work with it after all these years, and it does not look outdated at all. On the contrary, it has influenced all major "modern" operating systems. It has been the model for the hard-working Linux, it is the heart of the hip Apple OS, and Windows has borrowed so much from it (but is probably only 10% there yet) ...

What Geoffrey meant to say was just to give you a hint, a direction, but you have to follow the route on your own. Don't deny yourself the fun of learning Unix the proper way. Don't just copy and paste snippets of code but look at them as ideas, get the full understanding of these ideas, and then put the pieces together according to your tasks and plans.

Victor

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