Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook

And thanks for the copy suggestions. I am not a native speaker :)

As for a sample, I will go and try to make something now. Thanks.

Edit: Example pages here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PkUcLv83Ib6nKYF88n3OBqeeVff...

I'd love to read a table of contents. I don't want to rip you off with zero dollars!

Anyway, sounds like a great book. Congratulations on completing and "shipping"!

> The diff utility can compare files and print their differences. If we pass it the result of ls commands, we can compare the contents of directories.

No, if you pass the output of ls commands, you might get an error because you'll pass a bunch of files to diff.

And last but not least there's

    diff -r directory-a directory-b

For example, in my personal and professional life I use Make everywhere. The book mentions alternatives, but the examples are built on the time-tested tools.

I focused on things that don't require install (if given the option) or the ones that you are more likely to encounter at work. It is a tradeoff and I can see how the reverse would be appealing too.

I agree and I try to keep it as nice as I can, but it can be hard to do when the book is being updated and the content changes.

Nevertheless I will be mindful of it for the next update.

My primary motivation is to share the work that I spent a lot of time on because I want to move on and work on other things (I don't want it to just sit on my disk when it can be useful to others before getting outdated etc.). It never was meant to be some primary source of income. In that case I would be writing a book about AI :)

Maybe I will write a blog post with some reflections about making the book at some point :)

You teach this in a classroom?

also any command | while read line; do something $line; done

and find and vi of course

  bat     # cat with syntax highlighting
  zoxide  # keeps track of directories 
  tig     # ncurses git viewer
  atuin   # shell history across machines
  choose  # easier cut or "awk '{print $1}'"
  direnv  # set environment vars when you enter a directory
  fd      # better find
  fzf     # fuzzy find anything, total game changer
  gh      # GitHub client
  rg      # really fast recursive grep

Something that I didn't put in the book because I learned it only recently is the use of "notify-send", aka you can send yourself a system notification from the command line or script (at least it workd for me in Gnome). For instance once a task is finished:

> echo "when finished send notification" && notify-send "system notification"

Pretty cool if you ask me!

  set -o vi
  set -o xtrace
  xargs, xargs -I
  parameter expansion (see the Parameter Expansion section in the bash manual)
  ctrl + r
  find -exec
  lsof

> This is also the advice given in the google shell guide.

This advice is also given in this handbook :) But in reality you might come to a work repo that already has such scripts and it is good to understand it a little bit, I would think.

Edit: One reason why I picked PDF is that I expect the readers to actually follow the examples in their own terminal while going through the book. So in that sense I was thinking about reading it on the desktop.

Also, a TOC and sample chapter would be great. A lot more people will be likely to pay if they know what they're getting.

When I made my purchase, the options were Download and Send to Kindle. It's not ePub, but it's something.