Yet another poem I wrote before leaving uni, as I was about to lose my beautiful Unix account. With commentary, it was part of my Unix .plan file :).
—
An Ode To The Shell
Dear Shell
There is time still
In my heart, a heavy load
Soon, part I will
Accept my free-form ode
One line of script
And you saw me fit
Anointed with Unix Nature [1]
Awoken, once and forever
The ampersand
My background friend
The hash
Script docs in a flash
for and while
Benchmarking in style
Redirecting to file
On my face a smile
Commandline completion
My eternal companion
Your prompt my dominion
Forever awaiting my opinion
more or less
Your pagers did impress
rtin
A blessed sin
finger
How it made me linger [2]
who
Wouldn’t I like to know!
And ls?
Light on my directory’s mess
Oh kill,
Gosh what a thrill
foo, bar, and baz
Music better than jazz
command not found
advice so sound
Segfault fury
You threw at me
In all its glory
Initiating divine hackery
Synthesis of pipes and redirects
Plethora of commands at your behest
Skillfully accepting my greps
My shell, you are the best
Dear Shell
This is gonna hurt like hell [3]
I bid you farewell.
—
Commentary and references
Inspiration:
[1] tm esr, http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html [2] tm Cranberries, Everybody Else’s Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, “Linger” [3] tm Sarah McLachlan, Mirrorball, “Hold On”.
Good luck everyone. It’s been great (for the most part anyway) in CS.
To those who’ve read/answered/constructively criticized my posts, a sincere thank you. To those recently graduated, good luck with the jobhunting (shameless plug: let me know if you have a free spot :P).
And to my friends still struggling – hang on in there :).
— Kamal