this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Using curl as a substitute for man/help has made it one of my most used commands for me as of late:

curl cheat.sh/AnyLinuxCommand to view tldr/cheat tips

Also great for the weather via curl wttr.in

Hopefully more commands utilize this technique

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the tip! I sometimes use the program tldr for this purpose.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

tldr is also baked into cheat.sh too! (But it's redundant if you already have tldr/bro/etc installed probably)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately wttr.in produces incorrect weather reports in many cities around the world

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did not know about this. Care to elaborate?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Today I learned:

  • curl development cycle has a cooldown after a freeze.

How cool is that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Maybe its because I am tired but I don't get it, what does this mean?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I recently watched the 3.5-hour workshop Mastering the curl command line by Daniel Stenberg, the author of curl

I commend the author for watching and subsequently summarizing this into a blog article, but in the age of LLMs like ChatGPT I cannot be arsed anymore to memorize any of the arcane command line arguments of curl, ffmpeg and the like.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You don't have to memorize. Next time, you can just recall the commands by looking at manpages or this blog post again. You will already retain most concepts.

ChatGPT is cool, but it is wrong often enough that makes hard to trust. I don't want to be running the wrong command and suffering its consequences. I only resort to chatGPT when docs and web search do not give me an answer quickly. Even then, I try to verify chatGPT with docs before going forward.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, we're talking curl here, I don't think a lot of suffering of consequences is happening. And man pages are often also not a great resource, throw everything at you, often don't contain examples. If I'm building an app that integrates curl or libcurl, oh yes I'm reading the doc. If I just need curl to do something quickly, the LLM output is perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I think you're right, it is harmless for the most part. But one time I unintentionally overwrote a file using curl. It is definitely my own stupidity here though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'd be scared to perform POST/PUT with LLM-generated commands. For immutable calls I agree though