Parenting moments with shell scripting

I’m both fascinated by and borderline besotted with shell scripting (you know, all that command line stuff). It turns out my son is intrigued by what you can do from the command line, and it opens the door to some pretty cool parenting moments.

This afternoon I showed my son a little script I wrote that opens Firefox Developer Edition, VS Code, Remember the Milk, and displays the weather forecast for my city just by running an aliased script from my command line. The weather service is a very cool command line script that Jessie Frazelle wrote.

https://twitter.com/pauljacobson/status/937671751273676800

My son was astounded when he saw all these apps open after typing a single command in iTerm2. He immediately asked me to create something for him.

So I wrote a similar script for him for his Ubuntu PC. It doesn’t work quite the same as mine does on my Mac (Linux has an interesting way of opening some apps that tethers them to the terminal session) but he now has a little command he can use to open VS Code and give him a weather update from his terminal.

I love that he’s also into these things. He asked me to introduce him to something he can use to learn all these shell commands. He wants to write them down in a sort of cheatsheet. I have a couple of resources (the Linux Documentation Project is an awesome one I only recently came across) I’ll share with him, I think he’ll get a kick out of learning this stuff.