Unix for lazy people

I am a very efficient lazy person. I don’t like to type seven characters when two will suffice. I think Unix is a fantastic development environment. However, the overly long, verbose commands irritate me slightly. So I use the following aliases and shell functions

    a = tail -f ${ORACLE\_HOME}/rdbms/log/alert\_PRD.log
    l = ls
    ll = ls -l
    up = cd ..
    x = rm -fr \*
    z = wall 'Anyone fancy a quickie after work ?' [disciplinary action pending]

One of the happiest days of my life was when I discovered the tab completion feature in the GNU bash shell and the environment variable $OLDPWD.

When I used to work for Sequent (with an operating system called Dynix/ptx devoid of applications), I used to carry the GNU tools and utilities around on a cartridge tape. Unix and GNU tools were brilliant but the best development tool is Emacs.

The second happiest day of my life was when I discovered Emacs' dynamic abbreviation feature. If you had had to suffer the pain of typing ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous’ once, then subsequently, you could just type ‘sup’ following by ESC-/ and Emacs automatically, magically completed the word.

This was without doubt the best feature in Emacs. Well apart from Gnus, VM, font-lock, C-mode, dired, support for shell, grep and cc. Oh and apart from being able to edit text files.