trying out some coding stuff

[argentnoelle]

that i've never done before. I know some html, don't really know css but can make it do stuff for me, but for the first time I messed around in terminal & managed to find file directories and make it list out files that I have. I know, it's super basic lol :) but it was cool to see stuff happen when I typed! ah, not even list files in directories, I also got it to tell me when the files were created. Awesome.
Let's see if I can remember what the commands were:

cd [finding certain folders through paths]
ls [list]
ls -l [that's an L] [for showing the date created etc]
yay!

also figured out a small little issue that was confusing me for a bit. For a while I was having trouble where the path wasn't working, say

/folder1/folder2/folder 3

it was like "never heard of that place."

Then I managed to google & find out that, of course, it was getting all tripped up by the space. Of course! why would it think those were the same thing? I know it because I know what I named my folders but the computer doesn't. A folder with a space in the name has to be written like this:

/folder 1/folder2/"folder 3"

kind of self-evident. But also. cool! I figured it out :)

Comments

[mindstalk]

Congrats! I remember messing around with a DOS computer and manuals, and going from "magic command makes Pascal happen" to "ooh, there's a shell waiting for strings, and lots of the commands are just files on the disk and I can _see_ them."

The space-in-filename thing and "the computer" is a bit tricky. Under the hood, lots of functions for dealing with filenames are just fine with it containing a space. But you're not a programmer calling functions, you're a user interacting with one specific computer program, the shell (probably /bin/bash if default Linux or /bin/zsh if a Mac), and _it_ expects spaces separating all the interesting units in the commands you give it. Thus the need to quote names with spaces in them. Likewise, ? and * are treated specially by the shell, so a command like 'curl http://foo.com?name=Alice' needs to be 'curl "http://foo.com?name=Alice"' to keep the shell from trying to do something with the ?.

Also useful exploration:

man ls -- 'manual page' for the ls command. Most other file commands have man pages too. Commands built into the shell may not.
set -- by itself, dumps out all the environment variables. 'set | more' or 'set | less' more useful for seeing them all.

[argentnoelle]

oh, cool to know that about the shell vs the functions. Yeah, I'm on a mac and it seems to be using zsh. At least, every so often it'll complain to me that zsh doesn't know what I'm talking about lol. And thanks for the tip about ? and *, that makes a lot of sense. When I have some time I'll play around with those other commands too! :)