Hi.  This is my second try at posting to Agora.
I've been reading some of your past discussions
and like the flavor, but I'm extremely new on
the net.  Some tried to chat with me earlier
I think, but I was too dumb to be able to 
answer.  Howcum sometimes I get bounced
all the way back to my gopher menu when I 
exit one of your menus?  Too many ^Cs?
Peg  

112 responses total.

Yeah, that's probably it.  What exactly are you doing?

   Welcome to Grex, peg.

This sounds interesting but any comments from me would be like the blind 
leading the blind.

 peg, at the next OK: prompt type !more /u/omni/2 and that should 
set you straight on how to navigate around the world of Grex.

Nice text, omni.

How do you people remember all of these "!" commands?!?!?

Those "!" commands become a part of you after a while.

Thanks to omni, I'll check it out.  I have a feeling part of the

problem I'm having is just due to impatience and a slowwww system...
...plus, the "rn" command seems to drop me into a deep hole.  I'm 

sure I'll figure it all out.

OK.  Thanks to omni for the helpful hints.  I honestly
can't remember whether I was ^Cing or "q"ing when I
was getting bounced entirely out of grex...just knew
I wasn't in Kansas anymore...  so to robh, I'd have
to say, it's probably like my golf swing...if I 
knew what I was doing (wrong)..I'd never slice!
Thanks to Steve for the welcome.  How do you
find out what conference might be active at any
particular time?  i.e.  "where is everyone?"

I'm guessing that "!w" is the command that you'd like to know about.

It lets you know who is online, how long they've been online, and
what they're doing.

 I was happy to do it. You're welcome.

Re 6 - Jamie, I've been using Unix since 1987.  After a while,
the commands are just as easy to remember as the commands
of any command-line interpreter.  rm for remove, ls for list,
cp for copy, mv for move, simple!

ln for link, ed for the line editor, cat to view files or combine them,
ps for process lists, man to view manual pages, awk/sed/perl for weird
string processing... yeah, it makes sense! :)  diff, comb, uniq, grep. :)

Three useful commands (including !w) are:
!w - (see above)
!finger, which shows a list of everyone who's one plus their real names
!who, which is a condensed version of w (doesn't show what they're doing)

You left out some !s, robh. Here a supply - !!!!!.
Re #  6 - print 'em out and refer them until they're memorized.
Re #  8 - rn is slow as it reads over the SLIP link, but local disk is coming.
Re # 10 - no ! needed for w (see, they make things easy for everyone).
Now, I'm going to do omni's 2, and see if I can get the hang of this thing.

Rane makes a good point aboout news. Without enough disk space to hold
the news locally, we go over a slow link to fetch it item by item.
We plan on putting it on a local disk as soon as we can.
rn, trn, etc. will all speed up.

 Someone needs to keep reminding me that !rn brings up a news reader.  It
is NOT the equivalent of ren (rename) on MS-DOS!  To rename something, use
!mv to "move" it to the new name.  More than one I've gotten dumped into
the news reader while trying to rename a file. 

Ouch.

Re 14 - But I use cshell, so I don't needs !'s.  >8)

Thanks for !w info, carl.  Now I just have to figure out
where /usr/local/bin/bbs and "party" might be...

Is it just me, or are you Unix users a little sensitive
about your precious little language ;) ?  SURE it all
makes sense.. vi for...edit? and what the hell is grep?

grep is "get regular expression", I believe.
ANd yes, UNIX people are a very proud tribe, in my experience.

You are in /usr/local/bbs right now.  Party is a program that lets you
talk with lots of people in real time.  type "party" at the "Ok:" prompt
to try it out.

NO! Don't party! If you're expecting a party like you can find on other
conferencing systems, you WON'T! Party sucks!

Peg, "vi" is for "VIsual editor", I believe.  "grep" is for General Regular
Expression Print program, which I admit is no help to you since you don't
know what a regular expression is.  (A regexp is a pattern, and grep lets
you find lines containing a wide variety of patterns, as well as specific
literal strings, in a text file.)  (Don't even ask why awk is named that.)

You would have more appreciation for cryptic-but-**SHORT** names for things
if you'd had much experience logging into early-1970s minicomputers over
110 bps modems.  (Why, when I was young ... )

Peg, I've learned enough Unix to be past the point of dangerous.
I know what I know and I know what I don't know.

If/when we get more disk space, I'd like to keep some Unix tutorials
I found on the Web.  There is a basic tutorial available through
"lynx" in the Publicly Accessible Files.  It's popcorn's unix guide.

I just found out about "pico" (even though I had seen it mentioned
in a few places).  It's a *much* easier to use editor than vi.

And all I know about grep is that you can search one or more files
for a test string.  I don't know its syntax, and I won't even
mention the man command...

Davel slipped in.  He must be a faster typer...  ;-)

Manny Norman, an associate of mine at EMU, is no big fan of Unix,
but he does like to say that "grep" is the world's most useful
program, and I tend to agree with him.  It's amazing how many
often I want to find some particular piece of information buried
somewhere in a mass of text; grep is a powerful and flexible
program that makes such searching easy.

I'll add that "sed" (which stands for Stream EDitor) is the world's
second most useful program, although some might argue that "awk"
deserves that status.

I'd put awk over grep, but I admit that I learned it first and find the
differences in grep-style regexps confusing enough that I use awk first
even when I don't need processing on the results.  (For the same reasons,
I've only used sed a handful of times.  I think it's faster, but not when
you take the time *I* need to figure out what to do into account.)

There's a version of grep available for MS-DOS, and I've used it on my
home machine quite a bit.  

For editors, I use pico on unix systems, and WordStar at home. 

I use it (or one) too.  There are also very good freeware DOS awks.  In
fact, I learned awk on DOS, & still use it there all the time.

This response has been erased.

Re #29:  Where can I get a freeware DOS awk?

   Nowhere that I've seen Mark, if you like awks that behave themselves.
I've found at least three of them over the years, and got rid of them.

   I wrote grep's in BASIC back in 1975, but never knew what to 
call it.  I think 'scan' was the best name I could come up with.
My discovery of grep on a System 6 machine at the UM was a near
religous experience.

  <<I'll bet it was!>>

What problems did you have, STeve?  I have used a couple regularly with no
problems to speak of.  the mawk/bmawk Gnu version in particular has seemed
fine.  Rob Duff's version is OK too, & I like its extension of automatic
sorting of arrays by subscript.  (Doesn't support input pipes, however.)

Mark, try HAL 9000, I think.  If you don't find them there, mail me.

Uh, isn't HAL 9000 fictional?

No.  663-4173.

Area code??

(probably shouldn't say, seeing as I don't know, but my guess is 313.)

Sorry, bad habit of assuming everyone here is Ann Arbor area!  Yes, 313.
(You wouldn't want to phone in from LA, I expect, but you just might
be able to net in, Tom.  I occasionally get on looking for DOS software,
& have no further experience - but I think I've seen it recommended
as a way onto the internet, so you may well be able to log in over the net.)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss