Summary of a first mentoring session
Like many, I’ve been learning about the command-line, text processing and Unix utilities by looking at the work, questions and answers of others.
It works, but recently, I’ve been thinking that having one-to-one mentoring sessions would help me move on further.
I had someone in mind I could ask to: a programmer whose blog I’ve been consulting.
I asked. He responded positively. A few days later we had our first session scheduled.
The idea is to keep learning, keeping the Unix philosophy in mind. That’s kind of the underlying motivation.
This is what we covered:
We simplified a one-liner Bash script I’ve been using to pull out data from abook, a contact management programme on the command-line. I use a combination of abook, Mutt and Unix utilities as some sort of CRM.
K., the mentor in question, helped me see how Python or Perl could help me. I’ve only been using Unix utilities so far, e.g. grep, wc, cut, cat, less, etc.
We started to simplify another Bash script I use to send small batches of emails from the command-line via Mutt and msmtp.
K. introduced shellcheck to me. That’s great. That is a programme to check Bash scripts. The programme makes suggestions on how to improve those scripts. The programme is in Trisquel’s repository.
personal computing command-line interface (cli) gnu linux trisquel shell literacy wiki offline mentoring
