Unix (2 blogmarks)

I love an article like this where a person demonstrates a bunch of niche features of a tool they are a power-user of. In this case less.

I didn’t know there was much more to do with less than pipe it a bunch of stdout or view a log file with it.

A couple features that stood out to me where:

• using -N and -n to toggle line numbers on and off
• doing successive filtering with multiple % pattern invocations
• pulling in and navigating multiple files (still not totally sure of the workflow I’d use this for)

I guess there is a discussion that floats around the internet every once and a while that attempts to backronym the/usr directory as unix system resources directory when really it is just what Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie called the bucket for all user space directories when they mounted a second drive.

The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this, a
1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by
bureaucrats who never question why they're doing things.

The whole listserv message is a good history of how these directories came to be and how bureaucracy has propagated that forward.