Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 798.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2020-04-24 12:26:38+00:00
        From: Henry Schaffer 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.796: the poetry of Unix

If anyone is sufficiently intrigued by François Lachance's description of
Unix/Linux to the point of wanting to learn the basic commands, there is a
sort-of-interactive tutorial "Easy Glide Into Linux" 
(https://projects.ncsu.edu/it/open_source/tutorial/) designed to get people
started without demanding huge effort. (For full benefit, one needs access
to a Linux system set up for this. The one used in the tutorial is
accessible only to people at that university, but there are instructions on
how to set up the equivalent one elsewhere.)

--henry schaffer

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 3:42 AM Humanist  wrote:

>                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 796.
>             Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
>                    Hosted by King's Digital Lab
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2020-04-23 16:41:42+00:00
>         From: Francois Lachance 
>         Subject: The Poetry of Unix | Filing | Affordances
>
> Willard
>
> In this time of confinement, I have been reacquainting myself with Unix and
> command line processing (heartened by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen's remarks both
> on
> and off list). I have also been inspired by the threads on archive and
> secrets
> of programming languages. I have been learning again and more.
>
> I have had the time and luxury of renaming files with nice long human
> readable
> names (I recall as some point MS-DOS forcing FOO.EXT on the user -- a name
> with
> no spaces and only one dot to mark the extension). I like the discipline of
> Unix:
>
> [quote]
>
> All file names are case sensitive. ¦ (See note 1 below)
>
> You can use upper and lowercase letters, numbers,'.' (dot), and '_'
> (underscore) symbols.
>
> You can use other special characters such as blank space, but they are
> hard to
> use and it is better to avoid them.
>
> Source: https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linuxunix-rules-for-naming-file-and-
> directory-names
> 
>
> [/quote]
>
> My little minimalist toolbox includes: rm (remove),  ls (list), cp (copy);
> mkdir
> (make directory), mv (move). With repetitive use of this I have been able
> to
> construct a directory to archive old versions of the html pages I have
> thrown up
> over the years (taking them out of hiding so to speak with a link to the
> archive
> from the home page (for the curious)) and hacked a little dropbox for my
> self
> and others (clickable and cleanable thanks to the features of index.html
> (being
> present or not)).
>
> I have also explored the affordances of Apple's interface and remark that
> there
> is more for me to explore (make alias, save as, duplicate, duplicate
> exactly).
> And I have a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft's One-Drive owes something
> to
> Unix/Linux for its nifty permission controls.
>
> I miss the days of Wordperfect (scion of Wordstar?) which in my memory made
> backups with the extension .bac automatically. And I must admit I never
> really
> got to play with the great Note Bene before MS Word and its page-centred
> design
> came to rule the world.
>
> Thanks to all contributors to Humanist for provoking this useful and
> nostalgic
> tour of the software I have touched (not always softly) as I try to live
> up to
> the tag line that accompanies my signature these days -- to sort and
> shuffle --
> in an embodied and remembered fashion.
>
> Note 1
> I once used case sensitivity in names to exert a kind of version control
> for
> content management (managed via chance operations a la Cage)
> http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/jardin/
>
> Happy travels in, as the LRB says, improving the quality of your solitude,
>
> F
>
> ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~
> François Lachance
> Scholar-at-large
> Wannabe Professor of Theoretical and Applied Rhetoric
> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
> https://berneval.hcommons.org
>
> to think is often to sort, to store and to shuffle: humble, embodied tasks



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