

Down the 'ls' Rabbit Hole - mgorsuch
http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/2010/12/day-15-down-ls-rabbit-hole.html

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jeffbarr
These "down the hole" investigations can sometimes be used as the basis for
open-ended interview questions.

I always ask candidates to tell me everything that happens between the time
that they see an interesting link on the screen, click on it, and see the
result. I've had great answers in the space of 2 minutes, and amazing ones
that covered 15 or more. Some of the more spectacular answers referenced
neurons, muscles, round-robin DNS, firewalls, load balancers, application
servers, and more. I can really determine if they know how the web works or
not.

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jgershen
Nice article; it reminds me of taking OS at CMU. There's something incredible
about learning what happens all the way down when you call, say, printf.
Suddenly the computer transforms from an incomprehensible black box into an
fascinating marvel of engineering - but unlike a magician's act, the magic
only gets better when you see how it works.

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bhrgunatha
Aside from the interesting information about _what_ is happening is the
instructions on what tools to use to get the job done. An article like has a
double payload; I wish more were like that.

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birken
It is worth noting this whole series is incredible. I used to work with the
guy who started it (@jordansissel), and he was an incredible sysadmin/software
engineer. If you go through the archives on the right side, you will find lots
more incredible posts (although he doesn't write them all anymore, they are
all of excellent quality).

~~~
silentbicycle
Seconded! It goes back two years, and hopefully will continue for many more.
Excellent series.

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ihodes
Note, for those following along, that Mac users can use _dtruss_ (which is a
shell script that makes DTrace easier to use and more like strace).

What a neat article! Makes me want to explore some other commands and write
something similar up.

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scrame
Wow. Really informative.

I have used strace to try to debug unpredictable or unresponsive programs, but
it never occured to me to just run it against the commands I rely on that
actually work.

I did a combination gasp/chuckle when I saw the 'write(l, "bar\n" ...' at the
end of the ls dump. There is something both humbling and obvious about seeing
under the hood of the platform that I just take for granted.

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azar1
Heh, this is great. I just had to write a simple shell for my CS class, so
going into more depth with some of the stuff in this article is great.

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T_S_
Yes. I have this command aliased as 'fu'. Surprisingly easy to remember.

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monos
THE AMULET OF YENDOR: INSIDE THE KERNEL

JUST ONE MORE TURN...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack>

