of=/dev/sda

fool@programming.dev to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 538 points –
65

Having been in this situation (the only binary I could use was bash, although cd was a bash builtin for me), echo * is your friend. Even better is something like this:

get_path_type() {
    local item
    item="$1"
    [[ -z "$item" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to get_path_type'; return 1; }
    if [[ -d "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'dir'
    elif [[ -f "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'file'
    elif [[ -h "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'link'  # not accurate, but symlink is too long
    else
        echo '????'
    fi
}

print_path_listing() {
    local path path_type
    path="$1"
    [[ -z "$path" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to print_path_listing'; return 1; }
    path_type="$(get_path_type "$path")"
    printf '%s\t%s\n' "$path_type" "$path"
}

ls() {
    local path paths item symlink_regex
    paths=("$@")
    if ((${#paths[@]} == 0)); then
        paths=("$(pwd)")
    fi
    shopt -s dotglob
    for path in "${paths[@]}"; do
        if [[ -d "$path" ]]; then
            printf '%s\n' "$path"
            for item in "$path"/*; do
                print_path_listing "$item"
            done
        elif [[ -e "$path" ]]; then
            print_path_listing "$path"
        printf '\n'
        fi
    done
}

This is recreated from memory and will likely have several nasty bugs. I also wrote it and quickly tested it entirely on my phone which was a bit painful. It should be pure bash, so it'll work in this type of situation.

EDIT: I'm bored and sleep deprived and wanted to do something, hence this nonsense. I've taken the joke entirely too seriously.

was a bit painful

Well that's an understatement

My pain tolerance for shitty input methods has been permanently warped after experiencing psychic damage from using Teamviewer to connect to a system over a very flaky HughesNet satellite link. I was working for a vendor that supplied a hardware networking box to a stupid retail company that sells food and shit. I just wanted to ssh to our boxen on a specific network so I could troubleshoot something, but the only way I could get to it was via putty installed on an ancient Windows XP desktop on the same network as our box that could only be accessed with Teamviewer. My favorite part of that was that the locale or something was fucked up, so my qwerty keyboard inputs were, like, fucking transformed into azerty somehow?? The Windows desktop was locked down and monitored to a tremendous degree, so I couldn't change anything. The resolution was terrible, the latency was over a second, and half of my keyboard inputs turned into gibberish on the other side.

Oh, and I was onsite at that same company's HQ doing a sales engineering call while I was trying to figure out what was wrong. I spent 5 days sitting in spare offices with shitty chairs, away from my family, living that fucking nightmare before I finally figured out what was wrong. God damn, what a fucking mess that was. For anyone reading this, NEVER WORK FOR GROCERY/DRUG STORE IT. They are worse than fucking banks in some ways. Fuck.

EDIT: also, I asked 'why Teamviewer' and the answer was always shrugs. This was before the big TeamViewer security incidents, so maybe they thought it was more secure? Like, at least they didn't expose RDP on the internet...

HughesNet

the latency was over a second

It's going to space!

It very definitely was 😅 The way that company used the satellite network was cool, don't get me wrong. They would use it to push content out to all their stores with multicast which was really efficient with bandwidth. I loved it for that, but I hated interacting with it over unicast in any way, shape, or form. Horses for courses, as they say.

I wanted to try it on my phone to, since I'm bored sitting on my train to work, but appearently you can't copy text out of jeroba and now I don't care enough to open it in my webbrowser

Also if you tap on the 'kebab' menu and press View Source, you can copy the message.

.... but cd is a built-in

It would be pretty useless if cd was a child process that changed its own directory, only to return to bash and be back where you started.

Reminds me this great story from a different era:

https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

I got reminded of it last week after years. What are the chances it came up again. 😁

Hmmm command not found, let me just try the same command a couple more times, this time it will work right?

In IT teaching users to actually read and understand errors is always an uphill battle.

Tbh I'd try it multiple times too, just because the concept of cd not being there is horrifying and cannot possibly be the case

Very true, I would do the same and feel my stomach drop farther each time.

Also muscle memory. I keep typing aliases I only have on my computer :(

I learned early in my software engineering career these two beautiful rules of debugging:

  1. Read all of the words
  2. Believe them

Unless you were the one writing the program and its error messages - then check, that you didn't mess up there...

Until you write a compiler error in some deeply templated C++ code, in which case just reading every word takes all day

/s but not too much

Addendum to 2: never believe that what they say is relevant to what's actually happening here. You have a lot of faith that the people writing error messages knew what they were doing!

Having written some error messages in a godforsaken database frontend, an error message only means that something didn't work correctly and may or may not correctly indicate what is actually wrong

I mean, if the error says "variable foo is not defined" I don't think it's wise to go "I'm pretty sure it's defined, the compiler is just wrong" 😂

I don’t know, have you ever used JavaScript? I’ve run into some really fucking weird bugs. I’ve also spent hours trying to find the source of an error message only to discover the error message was lying and caused by some other error.

You see they all different one use / the other use - and ~

/S

Yeah but those are arguments to cd, the error says command not found

Edit: Sorry didn't see /S

Never dealt with an intermittent failure or race condition, eh?

Where is the Windows 'help' button, did you try that?

No problem, just tab complete your way around the filesystem.

I am immune to /dev/sda for I only have nvme

That might make it even more dangerous, because you get used to flash to usb sticks on "/dev/sda". And when you then use a device with a built-in sata drive, you might forget checking in a hurry.

Happened to me a once or twice. I am now only using bmap tools for this.

I realized I was long overdue for a hardware refresh when I learned that nvme drives are /dev/nvme and not /dev/sd[x] and I realized every single computer I interacted with was pre-nvme

An unintended benefit of using Qubes is that everything is a virtual machine and physical disks have to be manually attached to a vm before doing operations like dd. I haven't had to worry about accidentally nuking my main partition for a while.

Huh, yeah I suppose that's true. Qubes is an interesting project but I'm not sure it's for me. I selectively isolate apps I worry about using containers, I actually should give flatpak a try as it basically does that for me but I haven't seriously tried it yet.

echo $PATH

And alias to be sure.

bash: echo: command not found

bash: alias: command not found

echo and alias are both shell commands. If the shell is running (which it obviously still is), those commands should still work, as it does not involve reading data from disk, but from memory.

Edit: I just noticed the picture said cd was not found, which is also a shell built-in. So, I don't know.

Why would somebody lie on the internet?

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Switch your calculator with a computer. Try again.

You should all just use an immutable distro. Problemo solved-o.

/s

This isn't programming, just someone who sucks at bash.

sudo dd if=. /rpi3-aarch64-archlinux.img status=progress of=/dev/sd[tab] [tab] [enter]

I remember being so scared the first time I screwed up my $PATH