[ale] Proposal - ALE Bash Tutorial

[Andrew Grimmke]

Hi ALE community,

I, like others, I am sure, seek with great eagerness to ascend to the
highest realms of shell godhood.  Unfortunately, at this point I reside
at the the lowliest level of shell initiate.  

One problem, as I perceive it, is that one really needs to have problems
to work through in order to get better with the shell.  However,
recognizing instances where a clever and elegant shell solution are
appropriate is hard if you are not used to it.  The more one works
through problems using shell shortcuts, the easier it is to identify the
appropriate commands and where to use them.  Or when a particular
collection of piped commands works well for a certain task.

What I would like from the serious command line users on the ALE list is
some help.  Think about instances where you had a specific problem(s)
that you solved with a collection of piped commands or a shell script
and email them to me.

I will organize the exercises into a weekly bash tutorial lesson,
beginning with simple, common, even cliched series' of piped commands
and working toward good sized shell scripts. If a specific set of files,
directory structure, etc is needed (to apply the solution to), I will
create these and organize them into a tarball for the participants.  Of
course, I won't be collecting the answers or running a contest like or
anything like that.  This will be a work on your own, type thing. Of
course the archive will be around for this who wish to start from the
beginning at any time. 

I do not anticipate a - introduction to commands X, Y, Z; now use X, Y,
Z to solve the following problem - type of structure.  Instead, the
exercise should be the lesson.  The sources of information are out there
on the web (www.tldp.org).  In my opinion, the downfall of these
references is that they don't provide the challenge to the beginning
user I propose here. 

I have the web space, but hopefully we can link to it from the ALE site.

I imagine a simplified lesson would look something like this:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to the ALE Bash tutorial Lesson for week n

here are some solutions to last week's exercise:

$ foo -xy /home/me/foo/*[xy]?.txt|bar|grep x /home/me/foo
home/me/xyz|less
$ foo -xy /home/me/foo/*.txt|grep xyz /home/me/foo home/me/foo>foobar 

There are certainly many other solutions to the problem.  These are
provided as an example. 

This week's challenge is provided by John Doe.

Once upon a time John needed to do such and such.  He needed to organize
the output like blah blah.

Download this <href>tarball</href> and unzip it to a working directory. 
Don't alter the included the directory structure.  Sort the files
according such and such a criteria and organize the output in such and
such a way.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

What does everybody think of this idea?  Awesome and beneficial?  A
stupid waste of time?  Does anybody have any suggestions or opinions on
a better way to do this?  

Are there any list regulars who can help by supplying problems?  

Are there any newbies interested in working out weekly Bash puzzles just
for kicks?  


Cheers,

Andrew



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