A Linux Christmas Carol explained

David M Williams
Sunday, 28 December 2008 17:47

Opinion and Analysis

Before we continue, let’s just reinforce the BEL message. CTRL-G makes a “ding” noise on your computer.

With this out of the way, let’s finish the carol.

Our ringing bells are making spirits bright. This just begs for the Linux make command to be used, which will compile and build an app – or perform any processing which generates an output file in some way.

% make SpiritsBright

No more explanation is needed here; make makes sense.

We’re having such a great time that it’s such fun to laugh and sing. Actually, the wording is “Oh, what fun” which is making a statement about fun. It’s almost defining fun.

Under Linux if you want to know more about something you consult the manual – not a printed one, but the online manual pages otherwise known as man pages. The man command is the means of accessing this oracle.

Thus

% man fun | Laugh && Sing

means “Oh, what fun” (ok, bear with me here!) and we pass output to a command Laugh; a second command Sing also runs provided Laugh is successful – that is, we will laugh and sing, but if we don’t laugh then we won’t sing either.

When are we singing this sleighing song? Why, tonight! To make certain we have the date right I’ve used the Linux date command to print the current date and time, again, sending output to a text file.

% date > SleighingSong

And now time for the chorus! Join in if you like.

% echo ^G^G
% echo ^G^G
% echo ^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G
% man fun | OneHorseOpenSleigh
% echo ^G^G
% echo ^G^G
% echo ^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G^G
% man fun | OneHorseOpenSleigh

That should all be clear now; we’re jingling bells, jingling them all the way. Oh, what fun we’re having in our one horse open sleigh.

I’m pretty sure my alternate line need no explanation however:

wonderwoman% find / -name bosom –print

And with that, Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.