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by pksebben 1372 days ago
I'm not sure what a handmade program on windows looks like, so I could be wrong here, but writing shell scripts to do work takes a matter of minutes and creates composable, reliable stuff that vastly reduces the time to do other work. This means that as time goes on, more of my workflow becomes scripted and I very, very rarely work on the same problem twice.

Then there's the filesystem. It just works. Permissions are easy to grok and (most) error messages are clear about what's wrong. Everything being a file also means I use the same tools to: - investigate bugs in source code - check what processes are using what ports, files, sockets, etc - find files - find things in files

there's very little that can't be done easily with [grep, cat, ls, mv, cd, echo, curl].

Also, manpages are incredible. All my important documentation, right there where I'm doing my work.

It's really less about what's possible on windows / Linux, and more about how Linux lets me do things my way, which means I can consistently improve my methods.

Also, all the good Linux stuff is free. Both kinds, so not only can I use most of it without worrying about the cost, I can fix it when it goes wrong or modify it to be more like what I want.

I could go on and bore you more, but those are the key points.

2 comments

I'd also add the "Googlability" factor to this. If you want to check how to do anything in bash, you will have your answer within seconds. Not so with PowerShell. It's a much newer system that doesn't have decades of history.
> writing shell scripts to do work takes a matter of minutes

This is the core of it for me. Half the time I don’t even need to write a shell scrip, I just fling it straight onto the command line if I’m doing a quick one off task.