“Yo, wait! How did you do that? What was that command?”
It was sometime in the early-90’s at Lockheed. I was looking over my colleague Jim’s shoulder as he whirled his way around the command line on his Sun Workstation. He was showing me how to run nuclear survivability simulations on the spacecraft.
Then he did something — used some esoteric UNIX command — that dumped a sorted version of the file to the screen. It was exactly what we needed to see in the format we needed to see it.
I stopped him, and asked him what the hell that command was because I needed to know that one.
“Oh, it was this…”
And he brought it back up on the command line. Then he said,
“You need to add this to your Book of Magic Commands.”
I just blinked at him.
“Uh, what?”
He reached down, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a composition notebook. On the front was a piece of tape with the words “Magic Commands” written in Sharpie.
“Yeah, every time I come across an important command that does something I need, or something I don’t understand, but works, I write it down in this notebook. My Book of Magic Commands. If I ever lose this, I’m done for.”
And I started my Book of Magic Commands that very day. It wasn’t actually a notebook but a file folder full of papers on which I wrote down the esoteric incantations of the world in which I have spent the rest of my career. In that early era of the computer age, this knowledge was power. Those that knew the magic commands held a special pedestal in the hierarchy of organizational usefulness. The knowledge was centralized.
With the internet and ChatGPT, we software developers and computer power users no longer need to keep a notebook or file folder full of hand-written “magic commands.” The knowledge has been distributed. Anybody can ask for it and receive it. That’s generally a good thing, but there’s some nostalgia wrapped up in the pages of the “Magic Commands” notebooks tucked away in thousands of aging software developers desk drawers. I wonder what we’d learn about the authors if we collated all of that particular knowledge. Certainly something more than “here is the list of commands I used but didn’t really understand.”
I was looking through my filing cabinet for some old tax stuff and I ran across mine today. Here is that very first paper that started my Book of Magic Commands.
