Some years back I realized what a huge number of computer problems I encounter that I have solved before but can't remember what I did. Probably most of them. No catch-all solution for this, but liberal use of VCS helps, and etckeeper (from the great Joey Hess). Another thing I always do now, but seldom see others do, is add this to bashrc: export PROMPT_COMMAND="history 1 >> ~/.full_history" This will keep your bash history forever. Normally ~/.bash_history is rotated pretty frequently, I guess for obsolete disk space reasons (several years of heavy use is a couple MB), or maybe security if you tend to enter passwords as arguments or something (and you don't trust the administrator), please correct me if you know a better reason, but I have found the benefits of grepping this file to outweigh any of that. It does not replace .bash_history but complements it, as it would break ^p (the up arrow) in a multi-login (tmux) type situation. It also allows immediate access to the history of other shells which is normally not written until logout (probably so as to not break ^p). Or I might tell a new user to use a shell that doesn't suck! But I've tried to leave bash many times and never got far. In fact I almost exclusively write bash these days and only acquiesce to another language when it gets unbearable. Probably the best advice I could give about software: use what everyone else uses (as long as it is FLOSS). On Thu, Jan 17, 2019, at 5:55 PM, Akkana Peck wrote:

Mark Galassi writes:

...

GNU/Linux hackers: I'm teaching a segment on becoming a Unix/GNULinux power user. any tips form expert hackers on what's important? As an example from Christopher Gabriel:

"'automate as much as possible' and 'track everything with version control' are good generic tips"

My first suggestion: be familiar with shell pipelines, particularly piping commands through grep and sed.

...Akkana _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org