Unix Programming Environment !

Been laid low by that obnoxious thing called viral fever. If only happiness was a virus :( !!

Anway one good thing about being laid low, was that i could read up "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kerninghan and Pike. And this is a must read book, the excercises are meant to really oil your grey cells.

Finished 3 and half chapters in two days :) !! A few good things that I learnt :
: directories are files, and the content of these files are the files and directories that are present under it. More than just the contents, it also contains the i-name or inode of the files. So remember that pesky link number for each file when we do a ls -l. Well that link is the link from the directory to the file !!

: using shell builtins are always faster than commands. For e.g. shift, cp doesnt change the owner and permissions of the output file.
|| is much more faster than the corresponding if condition.

: awk and sed are coooool, but its gonna take an awfully long time for me to learn these "tools"

Well others I dont remember that well. But some of the shell programs are cool and very suprising in terms of simplicity. You need a particular mindset to do these things ! And i seriosly lack that mindset I guess !!

Will keep updating this page. I have perl to catch up on now.

ciao !!