An actual card game to teach actual kids how to actually combine unix commands with pipes.

task: print the most common line from a file, we need to first cat the file (in our case the file is card 03.txt), then sort it, uniq count it, then do numeric sort, then tail -1:

answer: cat 03.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -1

Print it yourself or… actually it’s sold out for now so you’ll have to print it yourself.

Today we have a special treat. A conversation with Brian Kernighan! Brian’s been in the software game since the beginning of Unix. Yes, he was there at Bell Labs when it all began. And he is still at it today, writing books and teaching the next generation at Princeton.

This is an epic and wide ranging conversation. You’ll hear about the birth of Unix, Ken Thompson’s unique skillset, why Brian thinks C has stood the test of time, his thoughts on modern languages like Go and Rust, what’s changed in 50 years of software, what makes platforms like Unix and the web so powerful, his take as a professor on the trend of programmers skipping the university track, and so much more.

Seriously, this is a must-listen.

What does it take to master a programming language like Go? Joining us is the author of Mastering Go to help us answer that very question and to discuss the third edition of the book.

Learn how sudo works by writing your own version in Python!

One might think that sudo is actually some binary deeply integrated into the kernel, relying on a special purpose-built system call to achieve its functionality. After all, it lets you use root without even providing the password for that account! But thanks to one bit inside file permissions, sudo can exist without any of this.

Your first thought when reading that headline might’ve been _WebAssembly. Mine was! But no, that is not how Browsix does its thing:

Browsix is a framework that bridges the considerable gap between conventional operating systems and the browser, enabling unmodified programs expecting a Unix-like environment to run directly in the browser. Browsix does this by mapping low-level Unix primitives, like processes and system calls, onto existing browser APIs, like Web Workers and postMessage.

They have examples of this tech enabling a terminal in the browser, a Latex editor, and even a client/server-based meme generator written in JS and Go.

Turns out the pass command on your local Linux box can be used for a bunch of encryption-related things in addition to what most of us use it for: managing a user’s password.

One cool example is you can hide API keys from shoulder surfers (and history’s memory) by storing the key encrypted on disk and using pass to access it at runtime:

curl -H "API-Key: $(pass provider/api_key)" ...

An excellent analysis of the age-old dependency management problem:

At this point, I hope the tension is pretty clear: on the one hand, it’s great to keep components small, simple, and composable. On the other hand, it’s terrible to bury yourself in a tangle of different packages, no matter how tiny they are. The Unix philosophy and killing your dependencies pull in opposite directions.

But the author doesn’t stop there. They also offer a potential solution, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, requires a compromise.

On The Changelog #451, I spouted off a very brief history of Unix, Linux, and related things. Thanks to our handy/dandy transcripts, that history has been transmogrified into a blog and accompanying audiogram. The podcaster’s version of Don’t Repeat Yourself!

Brett Cannon:

… over 3 years ago I set out to re-implement the Python Launcher for Unix in Rust. On July 24, 2021, I launched 1.0.0 of the Python Launcher for Unix… This gives you a py command on Unix which will always use the newest version of Python.

He goes on to describe some workflow niceties that a built in and also what this project is not about:

The Launcher is purely a convenience and not meant to be The Launcher For All Things; this should never end up in a Docker container.

This week we’re talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use cat or bat? What about man vs tldr? Today’s show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and maybe love.

Apollo is a different type of search engine. Traditional search engines (like Google) are great for discovery when you’re trying to find the answer to a question, but you don’t know what you’re looking for.

However, they’re very poor at recall and synthesis when you’ve seen something before on the internet somewhere but can’t remember where. Trying to find it becomes a nightmare - how can you synthezize the great material on the internet when you forgot where it even was? I’ve wasted many an hour combing through Google and my search history to look up a good article, blog post, or just something I’ve seen before.

If you scan Apollo’s README, you’ll know the author has put a lot of thought into this project. The more I grokked it, the more I thought of Monocle (which we’re doing an episode about soon). Turns out, it’s a direct inspiration (along with Serenity OS for the design).

You’ve probably seen many of these commands hit Changelog News over the years, but now you can see them all again in one hand-curated place. Who knows, maybe one or two will be new to you. I hadn’t heard of curlie previously, which looks like a nice merging of cur and httpie.

I would like to show some examples of this philosophy in action – of how one can use different unix tools together to accomplish something powerful.

This post takes you step-by-step through printing a leaderboard of authors based on number of commits to a git repo, browsing memes on reddit, setting your desktop wallpaper, and getting a random movie from an IMDB list.

This is a fantastic collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands useful for IT work or for advanced users. System commands, processes, file system, SSH, SCP, rsync, encrypting files, SSL certificates, databases, disk quota…and more.

You can even print it for reference offline.

Jeffrey Paul shares a ⛴ load of goodies. I particularly like this idea:

I have a Makefile in my home directory… that I use to store common tasks related to my local machine… The one I use most often, though, is make clean, which takes everything in ~/Desktop and moves it into ~/Documents/$YYYYMM (creating the month directory in the process if it doesn’t exist), and also empties trashes.

Reader beware: 4154 words, approximately a 23 minute read

Everybody who uses psql uses less pager. It is working well, but there is not any special support for tabular data. I found few projects, but no one was completed for this purpose. I decided to write some small specialized pager for usage as psql pager.

Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight, and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol, which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients.

There was previously a spotifyd written in C, but apparently Spotify killed the library it used, so they had to rewrite from scratch. ¯\(ツ)/¯