Reflections on Open Source in Today’s World

Articles

Article 1

Article 2

Introduction

The articles that I have selected are Linux specific and are describing the newer methods for gathering information and upgrading workflows with bash. Most commands that are built into bash have been around since the early days of Unix and *nix and need some additional updates for efficiency, streamlining, and over user-friendliness. The tools found in the articles below are some tools I use on a daily basis and some that I never used before and am glad I have discovered them

Why you need to drop ifconfig for ip

The first article I selected was for networking within the bash interface in a terminal. While learning Linux and the CLI, ifconfig was the main networking command that worked across multiple distributions of Linux and was very user friendly. The article selected, mentions this as ifconfig has served Linux well, but it is time to move on from the old and outdated utility.

Although ip is the new tool on the block, it is still available in most distributions installed by defualt or the net-tools package is available to download from the package manager. Also, with a new tool, the total move to the new standard cannot happen overnight due to the learning curve associated with the new standard. ifconfig is a pretty straightforward command and the article does a great job of comparing and noting the ifconfig and ip equivalents to showcase the differences between the two tools. Though I must say from my perspective, ipconfig is great for beginners, but ip has come along and fully updated the command and has allowed for more verbose options for the simple operations, albeit with a learning curve.

5 modern alternatives to essential Linux command-line tools

The second article I selected runs along the same lines as the first article but with more tools with their modern equivalents. The author selected the following tools

• ncdu
• htop
• tldr
• jq
• fd

The first two tools I have used their older equivalents top (for dynamically checking system processes) and du, with du getting the following alias in my .bash_aliases file: alias allocate="du -sh". The only noticible difference between top and htop are the aesthetics, they both work fine and both are installed on my distributiuon of choice, Parrot OS. I have not heard of tldr but upon installing it on my desktop, it seems like a cool tool, but in the end it appears that man is still better suited for what tldr is looking to replace: additional information and options for running a tool. When I look for help, I want to have as many options as well as much information on the options as possible. tldr does not accomplish this and man is installed out of the box for majority of the dirtributions of Linux that are one the market. The final two tools, jq and fd, I have not used, nor have I had the opprotunity to install them, especially fd since there seem to be some dependemcies that are not available for Parrot OS at this moment (this also includes trying to install the package with the --fix-missing flag for apt). jq is JSON specific, and I have not had the opporotunity to use JSON files for any projects that I have worked on, but look to learn more about them in the future.

Conclusion

In general, both articles have really good intentions, but their arguments may not have been as convincing as they intended. Both explained why the new tools were better, but I found that both articles showed the old and new equivalent of the same commands, but the first article only focused on one specific use case and two tools rather than a tldr on 5 different tools. When push comes to shove, both articles communicated their points well and I learned about a few more tools for bash that I had never heard of before and will look to apply these tools to my workflow and toolchain.