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Comment by MathMonkeyMan | Hacker News Reader

Almost nobody that I've ever worked with knows how the shell works. I send them [the docs][1] but what kind of world would this be if people read the docs? Also, not exactly a page turner.

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/V...

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I learned this stuff from friends, O'Reilly books and endless nights of failure and trial and error. I'm certainly not a super wizard, but I feel like I'm not missing any shell skills to be able to do what I need to do.

[Insert mild rant on kids these days having no attention span any more]

> [Insert mild rant on kids these days having no attention span any more]

We used to try a command and then alter it slightly to see what it would do.

I recommend not doing that with rm.

also poorly organized and formatted.

> Also, not exactly a page turner.

Really? I can’t be the only one that will spend hours reading this kind of stuff. You guys don’t read man pages for fun?

I spent countless hours poring over the multiple man pages for zsh, along with books such as "From Bash to Zsh" and the book Peter Stephenson wrote. I wrote up decent completions for some software I wrote for personal use. My software is completely non-interactive and relied on complex trees of commands. My thinking was that completions would make it usable. But my completions were buggy and I didn't fix them for years (I'd use the completions, hit TAB, get some error messages, and say "oops, let me do this without the completions." For years.)

Years ago I thought this was fun. Now I've given up on learning zsh _arguments and the like. Instead I have made my software more interactive (an LLM helps here) and wrote it in Common Lisp (even without an LLM) so that I get decent completion behavior in SLIME for free.

I actually do like reading these things. But big shells like Bash and Zsh are brutal, especially with their random grab-bags of features that come from multiple shells of years long gone.

If your completions aren’t based on your parsing you are doing it wrong. See DEC VMS.

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