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Apr
3
So we know that people can become addicted to drugs, alcohol, gambling an things like that. But can people become obsessed and addited with a Unix command? Well, I did. And this is my short story about the ls command. And how it took over my life and made me contemplate changing my name to ls.
When I was growing up in a rural village in Antananarivo, Madascar, I often dreamed about becoming a stray dog catcher and exporting them to Brooklyn, NY. But I would never have thought of becoming a Unix administrator. So how did a young guy who herded goats on the plains of Mahajanga end up in Brooklyn, NY and find work as a Unix administrator.
Before, I boarded the USS Lincoln as a stowaway, I dressed up in a goat costume and got herded on board. Before, I did that, I visited the Malagasy elder in Mahajanga to ask him for some words of wisdom. And he told me, “Babu, Teny fampiasa andavan’andro dir /w dir /w dir /w fampiasa ls -la ls -la ls -la”. Those words left me mystified.
Only when I landed the parking lot of The String Beans grocery store on Coney Island Avenue, did I try to decode what the Malagasy elder told me about the strange words dir /w and ls -la. So, I went to the nearest store which happened to be a computer store called, “Mr. Wong Computer Shack”. Mr Wong sold me a brand new 286 computer for 5 goats. Since all Madascary people learned english from the Bollywood subtitles, I knew how to read english. So for the hell of it, I would type ’dir /w’ on the keyboard.
By the time I had found housing and powered my computer on for the first time, I had already learned DOS by typing ‘dir /w’ over and over and over again. After a certain point, it became a habit and then an addiction. And then I would pretend to air type ‘dir/w’ whenever I wasn’t near a computer. I even dreamed about ‘dir /w’ in my sleep. So by total chance, I had become a DOS expert because I could type ‘dir /w’ so fast. Then someone told me about Unix and Solaris and I was intrigued.
And so then I wanted to learn Solaris. When I sat down in the Brooklyn College Sun lab, I suddenly remembered the second mystical word from the Malagasy elder, ‘ls -la’. And that’s what I typed in the keyboard. And lo and behold, it actually did something. And that’s one of the first commands I ever learned was ls. And then it was all downhill from there. I became an ls fiend. I’d ‘ls -la’ all day long. You see what I mean. I just used ‘ls -la’ as a verb. So when I’d ask about how someone was doing. I’d ask, ”So, how is so and so ‘ls -la’ing?
After learning to type ls -la so fast, people around me were impressed and recommended that I should run the entire City University NY IT department. But I said, “But How can I do that, when I only know one ls -la?”.
To be continued…
Comments
3 Comments so far
I was blew chai thru my nostrels as I read this fantastalistic article!
Haha, holy shit, this makes absolutely no sense. Hilarious!
LOL - Especially the part about “Mr Wong sold me a brand new 286 computer for 5 goats”
Thanks for the laugh!