[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[rudi.j.blom]

I started using 'cpio' in the 80tish and still use it, especially
transferring files and complete directories between various UNIX
versions like SCOUNIX 3.2V4.2, Tru64, HP-UX 11i..

The main option I use with cpio is (of course) "-c" and only occasionally "-u"

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[rtomek]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 01:49:25PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the
> Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an
> equivalent for current systems?
> 
> I have tried to forward-port the old learn sources to current Linux but
> my patience ran out :-)
> 
> Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.

I am not sure what kind are your students, but back when I was one
(and not in US, so my approach might not apply) there was some kind of
minimum required from a student to pass as "knows Unix". Stuff like
"show directory contents", "make directory", move around via cd and
pwd, chmod, some editing, write a C program and compile (CS students
were meant to program). It is possible that knowledge of /usr/bin/make
was optional. /bin/tar was definitely optional.

Majority (i.e. "all") would not give a hoot about some
"yoo-neecs". DOS and Windows 3.1 ruled in businesses, where the
majority expected to find themselves after graduation. Windows 3x was
all the rage. It had multitasking! And Novell networks, for the more
ambitious.

I learned more than minimum, because I actually wanted to _use_ the
facilities. Which means, solving a problem by writing some code (shell
script, makefile, C-file, awk). No need to convince me or make it easy
by some "pupil shell". I never expected this, I only expected good
manual or Readme.

BTW, I also perceived tools available on Unix as superior to anything
I could lay my hands on, including AmigaOS (which had number of
similar tools, but poor multitasking sometimes resulted in frozen
computer). Maybe VMS could compete, but was not so easy to have
account on it. So I falsely assumed one should choose the best tools
and now I am on this God-forgotten mailing list.

The list composed by Andy Kosela seems very plausible to my eyes, but
I am afraid the majority of modern students likewise are not going to
give a hoot.

Perhaps you could make some of them care more if you gave them a kind
of contest. Bare bones system install in virtual machine, no X, no
compiler, no perl, but yes vim and yes emacs (and maybe some others,
joe/jed?). Solve a problem? Small database a'la rolodex? For the rest,
just demonstrate they can mkdir/ls/cd/chmod etc and let them
go. Solving Project Euler tasks with shell scripts (or awk, when
applicable). A bit harder - solve the tasks and make an uber-script
which lists available solutions (say, it will find there are solutions
for problem 3, 5 and 9 and list them) and can display an answer for
problem by running a script. Student writes a solution-script and
uber-script auto detects new file and can use it without need to be
edited. If the solutions dir is empty, it will say no solutions
found. Etc.

I suppose some folks will be delighted by doing such things. Other
will be kicking and screaming - no need to give them bad memories of
Unix. Rather, let them see others who achieve.

I am not sure, maybe I would be a very bad teacher.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[clemc]

It's worse than just being XML.   The whole idea of tar and cpio was to fix
the problem tp/stp had of putting the catalog at the front of the tape
(archive) and thread the directory through out it.   Sigh...  if you don't
learn from history, you are destined to repeat iot.

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020 at 6:12 PM Derek Fawcus <
dfawcus+lists-coff at employees.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 07, 2020 at 05:05:52PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > Dave -- please, let's not re-live 'tar-wars'   -- it's why the POSIX
> > command is called 'pax' - God Bless USENIX for funding the original
> > implementation and putting it in the public domain.
>
> [snip]
>
> > pax has a user interface that work either ways, and the USENIX public
> > implementation can read both tape formats..
> >
> > Clem
> >
> > PS At Masscomp, I once wrote "car" but no one ever wrote "tpio".
>
> and now we have xar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xar_%28archiver%29),
> since obviously everything can be improved by a dose of XML ! ;-)
>
> DF
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[dfawcus+lists-coff]

On Sat, Mar 07, 2020 at 05:05:52PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> Dave -- please, let's not re-live 'tar-wars'   -- it's why the POSIX
> command is called 'pax' - God Bless USENIX for funding the original
> implementation and putting it in the public domain.

[snip]

> pax has a user interface that work either ways, and the USENIX public
> implementation can read both tape formats..
> 
> Clem
> 
> PS At Masscomp, I once wrote "car" but no one ever wrote "tpio".

and now we have xar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xar_%28archiver%29),
since obviously everything can be improved by a dose of XML ! ;-)

DF

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[clemc]

Dave -- please, let's not re-live 'tar-wars'   -- it's why the POSIX
command is called 'pax' - God Bless USENIX for funding the original
implementation and putting it in the public domain.

- tar was research/BSD and worked best when you chdir to some directory and
were working interactively and was the logic follow on to the earlier stp
and tp. It was ASCII and after the binary issues of tp was a welcome
relief. The format was also extensible (thanks to bug in the original
implementation).
- cpio was USG and worked best with a find(1) script/automation - which was
good for controlled distributions but poor for interactive use. It was also
binary originally (with PDP-11isms builtin)

The real issue in the end was cpio being part of System III many/most
universities did not have it originally, so the tp/stp was what we used,
which was replaced by tar.

pax has a user interface that work either ways, and the USENIX public
implementation can read both tape formats..

Clem

PS At Masscomp, I once wrote "car" but no one ever wrote "tpio".

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020 at 4:50 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Mar 2020, Andy Kosela wrote:
>
> [ List elided ]
>
> What do you have against "cpio"?  Admittedly it's harder to use than "tar"
> but I still come across it from time to time; also, "tar" had a bug at one
> time whereby it did not handle an empty directory, and I think there was a
> problem with devices/sockets as well.
>
> Heck, I still have "cpio -adplumv" burned into my retinas.
>
> -- Dave
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[dave]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2020, Andy Kosela wrote:

[ List elided ]

What do you have against "cpio"?  Admittedly it's harder to use than "tar" 
but I still come across it from time to time; also, "tar" had a bug at one 
time whereby it did not handle an empty directory, and I think there was a 
problem with devices/sockets as well.

Heck, I still have "cpio -adplumv" burned into my retinas.

-- Dave

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[akosela]

"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl at gmail.com> wrote:

> Marc Rochkind used to recommend reading the entire UNIX manual each year.
> That was good advice in the late 70's, but it would be hopelessly
> impractical now, quite beyond the lack of a manual to read. There are just
> too many commands and libraries. A valuable service would be to identify
> the most useful tools. Those in the old manuals would be an interesting
> starting point, but I can't remember when I last used "ar" command, which I
> mostly used to pack multiple files into a single one to save inodes and
> wasted file system space, neither of which matter any more. If there were a
> corpus of contemporary shell scripts, identifying the most used commands
> could be interesting. Perl's CPAN (comprehensive perl archive network)
> could be a corpus of scripts from which the most commonly used system calls
> could be extracted.

I compiled such a list a couple of years ago.  Most of those commands
should be available on every major flavor of Unix and I consider them
"the core Unix tools".  This is not a final list, but commands I
personally use most often.  Certainly you can't call yourself a Unix
user if you have never consulted their manuals.

as, at, awk, basename, bc, cal, cat, cc, chmod, chown, cp, cut, date,
dc, dd, df, diff, du, env, expr, false, find, fmt, free, gdb, grep,
gzip, head, hexdump, id, iostat, join, ld, ldd, less, ln, ls, man,
md5sum, mkdir, mkfifo, mv, nice, nl, nohup, od, patch, passwd, paste,
pgrep, pkill, ps, pstree, rev, rm, rmdir, script, sed, seq, sh,
sha256sum, shuf, shutdown, size, sleep, sort, split, stat, strip,
strings, stty, su, sum, sysctl, tac, tar, tail, tee, top, touch, tr,
tree, uname, uniq, uptime, vmstat, w, wc, whatis, whereis, which, who,
whoami, xargs, yes

I specifically excluded all shell builtin commands and core network
related tools like ping(8).

It is interesting to note that still most of them come from the earliest
Unix versions.  It shows the ingenuity and beauty of the original
design.

--Andy

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[bakul]

On Mar 4, 2020, at 5:00 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 01:49:25PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
>> Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the
>> Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an
>> equivalent for current systems?
>> Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.
> 
> I've made a start with a new version of a "learn"ing tool. It uses tmux
> to have a pane of instructions and a pane where the user enters commands.
> Link to the repo is: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/tlearn/blob/master/tlearn
> 
> This is all protoyping at present. I'd love any ideas & suggestions.

I am tempted to suggest something like a Jupyter notebook, sort
of a manpage where examples can be modified or run interactively.
That is, even the learning instructions can become manpages that
can be referenced later even. May be some of that can become new
intro!

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[grog]

On Thursday,  5 March 2020 at 22:23:31 +0100, Arrigo Triulzi wrote:
> Someone (sorry, lost the message by deleting it and discovered I
> don't archive COFF...) mentioned that "learn" is still around in BSDs
> but I didn't find it in either FreeBSD or OpenBSD (base or
> packages). Where should I look? Or was it a "compile it off
> 4.4BSD????

Interesting.  I took a quick look around my (FreeBSD) machine and
located a directory /home/src/OpenBSD/3.0-RELEASE/usr.bin/learn/,
dating from October 2001.  It no longer compiles with clang, but a
quick attempt with gcc and without (clang) default flags at least
produces object files.

I've put a tarball at http://www.lemis.com/grog/src/learn.tar

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[arrigo]

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Someone (sorry, lost the message by deleting it and discovered I don't archive COFF...) mentioned that "learn" is still around in BSDs but I didn't find it in either FreeBSD or OpenBSD (base or packages). Where should I look? Or was it a "compile it off 4.4BSD”?

Cheers,

Arrigo

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[jpl.jpl]

Marc Rochkind used to recommend reading the entire UNIX manual each year.
That was good advice in the late 70's, but it would be hopelessly
impractical now, quite beyond the lack of a manual to read. There are just
too many commands and libraries. A valuable service would be to identify
the most useful tools. Those in the old manuals would be an interesting
starting point, but I can't remember when I last used "ar" command, which I
mostly used to pack multiple files into a single one to save inodes and
wasted file system space, neither of which matter any more. If there were a
corpus of contemporary shell scripts, identifying the most used commands
could be interesting. Perl's CPAN (comprehensive perl archive network)
could be a corpus of scripts from which the most commonly used system calls
could be extracted.

On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 8:00 PM Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 01:49:25PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> > Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the
> > Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an
> > equivalent for current systems?
> > Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.
>
> I've made a start with a new version of a "learn"ing tool. It uses tmux
> to have a pane of instructions and a pane where the user enters commands.
> Link to the repo is:
> https://github.com/DoctorWkt/tlearn/blob/master/tlearn
>
> This is all protoyping at present. I'd love any ideas & suggestions.
>
> Cheers, Warren
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[wkt]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 01:49:25PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the
> Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an
> equivalent for current systems?
> Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.

I've made a start with a new version of a "learn"ing tool. It uses tmux
to have a pane of instructions and a pane where the user enters commands.
Link to the repo is: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/tlearn/blob/master/tlearn

This is all protoyping at present. I'd love any ideas & suggestions.

Cheers, Warren

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[dave]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2020, Warren Toomey wrote:

> Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the 
> Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an 
> equivalent for current systems?

Knowing Penguin/OS bloatware there's probably a multi-GB GUI that will do 
the same job as will a simple C program and a structured directory 
hierarchy...

Or perhaps there's always "info" :-)

-- Dave

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[wkt]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 07:23:27AM +0100, Sergio Pedraja wrote:
>    Are the sources of 'learn' available? I doubt I could help but just in
>    case...

Yes, online here:

https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/learn
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=OpenBSD-4.6/usr.bin/learn

and also in several of the 4BSD versions.

Cheers, Warren

[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[thomas.paulsen]

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[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[spedraja]

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Hi/Morning from my location.

Are the sources of 'learn' available? I doubt I could help but just in
case...

Have a Good Day.

Cordiales saludos / Best Regards / Salutations / Freundliche Grüße
-----
Sergio Pedraja

El mié., 4 mar. 2020 4:49, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> escribió:

> Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the
> Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an
> equivalent for current systems?
>
> I have tried to forward-port the old learn sources to current Linux but
> my patience ran out :-)
>
> Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.
>
> Cheers, Warren
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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[COFF] 21st Century Equivalent to 'learn'?

[wkt]

Hi all, I'm looking for an interactive tool to help students learn the
Unix/Linux command line. I still remember the "learn" tool. Is there an
equivalent for current systems?

I have tried to forward-port the old learn sources to current Linux but
my patience ran out :-)

Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.

Cheers, Warren