• palordrolap
      30•9 days ago

      I know you’re joking but:

      \sl or command sl.

      I’d say “check your shell documentation” but they’re both almost impossible to search for. They both work in Bash. Both skip aliases and shell functions and go straight to shell builtins or things in the $PATH.

      There’s also /usr/bin/sl but you knew that.

          • @pivot_root@lemmy.world
            3•9 days ago

            Oh, I was just remarking that I don’t have anything but env installed in there. I wouldn’t be able to run sl by its full path unless I go searching for wherever that is

            • palordrolap
              4•9 days ago

              Whoa. What distro is it that puts everything in /bin, or at least, practically nothing in /usr/bin?

              I use a Debian that actually symlinks /bin to /usr/bin so that they’re one and the same (annoying some purists), but even on systems where they are (or were) used for separate purposes, I thought that each had a significant number of commands in them.

              (To paraphrase man hier, /bin is for necessary tools and /usr/bin is for those that are nice to have.)

              • @qqq@lemmy.world
                5•9 days ago

                They’re likely using NixOS. It makes /usr/bin/env and /bin/sh for compatibility but nothing else goes in those dirs

              • cally [he/they]
                5•8 days ago

                NixOS, all packages are in /nix/store/, where each package had its own folder (simplified because there’s the hashing stuff but idk how to explain that)

                This allows you to have multiple versions of the same package, on the same system, for example.

    • @_thebrain_@sh.itjust.worksOP
      42•9 days ago

      Some people want to watch the world burn.

      In order to improve your accuracy might I suggest:

      alias i='sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'
alias s='sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'
alias sl='sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'
alias ll='sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /'
...

      Etcetera. It will make sure you are punished for typos

  • FlaxEnglish
    44•9 days ago
    sudo apt install sl

    Thank me later

    • @_stranger_@lemmy.world
      10•8 days ago

      I remember people groaning in the CS lab in college when they realized they hadn’t locked their machine before walking away for just long enough to let someone install sl.

      • FlaxEnglish
        7•8 days ago

        I am a menace around unlocked computers. Was at a job and found a colleague who left his computer unlocked and had customer information open in a co working space on his screen. Set his computer language to hebrew before locking it.

        Another time in college I found an unlocked computer in a library. Set their profile picture to Chris Chan with an overlay image saying “#ThisIsMyAuthenticSelf #Unafraid”. On this system, the user was not likely to see their own picture, but other people they contact will.

        • @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
          3•7 days ago

          Couple of jobs back, the custom was to either set the background image to something disgusting and borderline NSFW, or go on the equivalent of Slack that we used and announce “I’m getting everyone pizza tomorrow” for them. The latter was considered just punishment for a security violation.

      • Nailbar
        5•8 days ago

        They left a root session open? Then they really deserved it.

        Oh, maybe it was just the sl binary downloaded somewhere.

      • @sykaster@feddit.nlEnglish
        4•8 days ago

        Logging in on the high school computers there was a way through some folder tree into the wallpapers of all the teacher accounts. Boy did we have fun with that, they never found out who did it though

    • @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      1•7 days ago

      I’m officially done with Google, I think. Search results for ‘sl’ were nothing useful. But the AI response takes the cake.

      “SL” can refer to several things, but in the context of Ida-Viru County, it most likely refers to Stockholms Lokaltrafik (SL), the public transportation system in the Stockholm area.

      I don’t live in that county, not even close tbh. And even if I did, how would the public transit system in another country, across a sea, be all that relevant to me?

      • @boonhet@sopuli.xyz
        1•7 days ago

        I now used an actual search engine to find this article and will install it, except I don’t think I’ll see it all that much because I don’t think I’ve ever misspelled ‘ls’ as ‘sl’ :(

  • Endymion_Mallorn
    20•9 days ago

    Mint comes with dir aliased for ls, and the only other one I regularly use is cls for clear.

    Yes I grew up on DOS, how can you tell?

      • @rtxn@lemmy.worldM
        18•9 days ago

        It gets better. PowerShell 5, which is still the default installation on Windows 11, aliases curl and wget to Invoke-WebRequest. The fucked-up part is that Win11 includes the real curl too, but the alias shadows it, and you have to use curl.exe. The even more fucked-up part is that Invoke-WebRequest still uses Internet Explorer to parse the result, and will panic if -UseBasicParsing is not passed every time, or IE isn’t installed and initialized.

        I used to develop applications in PowerShell. I still wear the mental scars.

        • @pivot_root@lemmy.world
          6•9 days ago

          The even more fucked-up part is that Invoke-WebRequest still uses Internet Explorer to parse the result, and will panic if -UseBasicParsing is not passed every time, or IE isn’t installed and initialized.

          That is absolutely horrifying.

    • @Finadil@lemmy.world
      4•9 days ago

      I got used to all the other Linux commands, but I had to make an alias for md=mkdir. Why that already isn’t a thing is beyond me.

    • @wheezy@lemmy.ml
      3•9 days ago

      People type clear instead of CTRL+L?

      I’ve never had a terminal that that didn’t work in. Or at the very least have a shortcut be able to be set for.

      • EpheraEnglish
        1•8 days ago

        I often use clear when I need to rerun the same command and want to see the output in isolation each time, so I might run clear && ./build.sh and then just press the up arrow and run it again.

        But I think, many people are also just not aware of the keyboard shortcut or don’t care to remember it, since they don’t use it often and clear is easy enough to guess.

        • @wheezy@lemmy.ml
          2•8 days ago

          I guess I’m the other kind of brain. I tap Ctrl+l on cooldown. But the up arrow thing makes sense. But still doesn’t explain the alias if you’re not actually typing it often.

      • @Matriks404@lemmy.world
        1•8 days ago

        CTRL+L and clear command do two different things (at least when using Bash on Debian):

        • CTRL+L scrolls the terminal output one screen so you don’t see your previous output, unless you scroll up;
        • clear does indeed clear terminal output completely, and your previous command history is available only through the history command.

        If you want CTRL+L to clear your screen completely you can add following to the .bashrc (or other file that is sourced when starting Bash, e.g. .bash_bindings):

        bind -x '"\C-l":clear'

        Note that it might not work if you use Vi mode inside Bash, but who does that.

    • Captain AggravatedEnglish
      23•8 days ago

      UGH that shit.

      rm deletes a file. It can’t delete a directory, you have to use

      rmdir to delete a directory…as long as there’s nothing in that directory. If there’s anything in the directory, you have to know to use

      rm -r to delete a directory and its contents, and no

      rmdir -r isn’t right somehow!

      • @Opisek@lemmy.world
        3•8 days ago

        Reminds me of a little annoyance I have with cat and ls. Yeah they technically do different things, one is for files and one is for directories. But so often I just find myself wishing I could use one command for both. Like making cat directory act as ls. Maybe I’m the only one who feels that way.

      • @Matriks404@lemmy.world
        3•8 days ago

        I don’t think there’s any reason to use rmdir unless you write (Ba)sh scripts, and you want to make sure that the directory is indeed empty. Just use rm -r.

        Also note that you can use rmdir -p this/is/some/path to remove all nested directories including the parent (this here). But this will only work if there’s exactly one directory per parent directory, and the last directory doesn’t have any files (including directories). This might be helpful for some scripts.

        rmdir -r isn’t a thing, because that would invalidate the reason this command exists.

      • setsubyou
        2•8 days ago

        On Linux, rm can delete empty directories with -d too, not just with -r.

        rmdir is the counterpart to mkdir, which creates empty directories, so of course it can only remove empty directories. After all mkdir can’t create full directories either. There however is rmdir -p as a counterpart to mkdir -p, so if there is something in the directory, you can use that, as long as the something is an empty directory.

        • Captain AggravatedEnglish
          4•8 days ago

          Yeah it still has a certain “AAAAH! You didn’t say simon says” feel to it when you’re actually trying to get things done. Like imagine if you had to choose a different option from a context menu to delete a folder in a GUI. If there was an option for Remove File and another one placed a little elsewhere in the menu that says Remove Directory.

          I’m still gonna call it an unsanded corner.

          • EpheraEnglish
            1•7 days ago

            I feel like the main reason the distinction exists, is because deleting a whole directory can be potentially catastrophic.

            I looked at Trashy yesterday, which gives you a command trash my_file that just moves the file into the trashcan folder. Well, and that decided to make no distinction between files and directories, which does make sense to me, since you can just restore a deleted directory.

            • Captain AggravatedEnglish
              1•7 days ago

              My solution: rm will remove an empty directory, while a full directory will throw either an “are you sure? y/N” or require you to use rm -r. Why have a command whose only job is to remove an empty directory?

              • EpheraEnglish
                1•6 days ago

                Yeah, I feel like a big part of the reason it was designed like that, is because it was designed in the 70s, where you couldn’t really throw up interactive prompts. But interactive prompts are also somewhat tricky for scripting, as it’s difficult to detect whether a user could respond to the prompt, meaning the script might just hang there forever.

                That’s kind of the problem. You almost need separate tools for scripting and interactive use, but having separate tools is also not great, since people will inherently try to use the tool they know for everything…

    • ByteOnBikes
      4•8 days ago

      Tabbing? I just copy and paste my commands from stack overflow AI garbage now.

  • @saltesc@lemmy.world
    13•9 days ago

    I’ve done similar before and was still blown away by the bad data.

    Somewhat unrelated, but still a hell of a story in the power of human input into data…

    Working in the healthcare industry during COVID, federal law had 18,000 of our employees required to submit proof of vaccination to continue working in our hospitals and clinics. All they had to do was get their vaccination certificate PDF off the government website, type in their staff number, and upload the form, we then submit this information as the employer to confirm that these people do indeed work for us and are safe to continue doing so.

    56% managed to do it. The rest were all sorts of shit. Most common were people that took photos of their computer screen, converted the photo to PDF, and uploaded that. Next most common was people print the PDF, scan it, then upload the scan PDF.

    We had thought of everything to make a simple download then upload as easy as possible, including a 3 step video, and yet they went above and beyond in unimaginable ways. The people that genuinely didn’t know what to do hit the support link so they could be guided through it and did things perfectly in a couple mins—the self-confessed computer illiterate people were not a problem at all.

    Thanks to training a form detection bot, I got it down to under 2000 remaining in a day, and the looming threat of “You have to do this or we can’t legally give you work and pay you until you do” quickly sorted out the rest.

    People will ALWAYS fuck things up in ways you’ve never thought of before. Reading the short, clear, and user friendly instructions for the simple job doesn’t work and they’ll get angry that something went wrong, every fucking time.

    • @wheezy@lemmy.ml
      4•9 days ago

      It’s basically the “There is only a single state in which a knot is untied. There are infinite ways in which a knot can be tied.”

      • @saltesc@lemmy.world
        1•9 days ago

        Well, ackshually…

        Eh, I can’t be bothered looking it up, but knot theory in mathematics, we’re at like 56M combinations or some insane number possibly many millions above or below that.

        It’s a weirdly interesting area of mathematics lol