Indulge me for a moment...

[usernamenumber]

...while I talk about something, like, 5 people are going to care about:

I always tell my students that what makes Linux's learning curve worthwhile, particularly for sysadmins, is how phenomenally lazy it lets you be once you've overcome it. Case in point, I needed to copy a PDF to a system that I could only reach by way of another system. Sure, I could have copied it to systemX, then ssh'd in and from there copied it to systemY, but that's tedious. We hates tedium. How about this instead?

[brad@foo ~]$ cat file.pdf | ssh systemX "cat | ssh systemY 'cat > file.pdf'"

The rabbit hole, it goes deep.

Comments

[zapf.livejournal.com]

You're a scary monkey. But I like it. I don't think I would have thought of that in a long while. Maybe if I had to do it a bunch of times or regularly I would have, but my first thought would be to write a bash script.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

well, you know, you hope that you've got keys set up. But then, you did talk about how it allows you to be lazy...

[londo.livejournal.com]

There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

<3

[bleemoo.livejournal.com]

One of the things I love about Linux is the fact that while you can do stuff like this, you can also not, and it's still a perfectly functional OS. I rarely have occasion to open a terminal window, and when I do, it's usually just to kill -9 something that's frozen. But the knowledge that if I needed to, I could teach myself how to do things like this makes me happy.

[teenyweenyowen.livejournal.com]

Behold the power of *NIX!