On Sun 17 May 2026 at 01:28:44 (-0400), Karen Lewellen wrote:
Hi David,
This is not my desktop, with my not having permission to add software.
I am aware of that. As far as I can ascertain, you buy two services,
dreamhost, a web hosting service, and shellworld, which we're involved
with here.
Shellworld says that they supply linux shell accounts, though they
don't appear to say which one, on the sole web page I can find of
theirs. So I think we're all assuming it's bash.
You seemed to understand the concept of a "home directory", though
you thought that . specified it: it doesn't. In bash, ~ stands for
the home directory, and . stands for the current working directory,
the one you're "in".
You've spoken about your shell workspace, something I assume is
part of the shellworld service. Can you explain whether that is
the home directory of your shell account, and if it isn't, then
what it actually is.
As for "added software", it's difficult for me to conceive of a linux
shell account that lacks awk, date, grep, rm, touch, ie the commands
used by different people's suggestions. So no one is asking you to
install software for such a trivial task.
I do thank you, and everyone else, for ideas.
Speaking personally though, one thing I learned from all the options
sort of underscores a long held stance of my own.
If one wanted a hand clapping program in Linux, you would likely end
up with three. one for the right, one for the left, and a third to
make them clap smiles.
Leaving aside the implied and unneeded criticism here, linux has such
an abundance of tools that it's hardly surprising that different users
choose different ones as their goto favourites. Find is an obvious
direct method for solving your problem, but not everybody is familiar
with all its options—hence the workaround of piping a list of all the
files from ls into grep, to filter the ones you want.
At this stage, speaking personally, it might be faster for me to find
the article again creating a new file and name.
It may well be. Remarkably, people on this list tend to assume that
you're sitting at a linux computer with a command line and a screen
reader. And you're not. So it might help to explain exactly what is
available to you in a shellworld shell account. Otherwise we end up
with another thread full of miscommunication, which can end up getting
acrimonious, as has sometimes happened here in the past.
My main desktop uses DOS.
Yes, we know—the fantastical magical world in which everything works
consistently.
But that doesn't tell us much about your shell account.
For me, I could locate this with a simple single command...and I have
been spoiled by the ease of ls -l when hunting through scores of
things on my Linux shell services.
Of course you could. It takes little more than piping ls -l into
a pretty simple grep. Are you at all familiar with grep?
Cheers,
David.
