Where can I go to see a command line ninja?

September 12, 2015 7:58 PM

I'm having trouble finding a video clip of someone using a command line / terminal quite fast, ideally using command line shortcuts and hotkeys. Basically, a command line ninja doing his or her thing.

I've checked through hundreds of movie clips from movies that feature "hacking", searched all through video.google.com and youtube.com and watched through dozens of command line tutorials, but there's nothing even close to what I want. I feel there should be something out there showing someone being a real pro on the command line.

It would be great if it featured the person accomplishing a big task just via the command line, and fairly quickly, using tab completion and Ctrl-R and the up key, etc. But at this point I would be happy with just some fast command line using video.

posted by tasty to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

People don't do this because the command line is will turn on you if you make any mistake or typo. You're much more likely to type this way when writing code in an editor. You'll probably have more luck searching for vi videos*.

* Oh god, is this really a thing? Seems possible, I guess.
posted by ryanrs at 8:31 PM on September 12, 2015

There's hackertyper.net, which lets you randomly bang on the keyboard but makes it look like you're typing in what appears to be linux kernel code.
posted by smcameron at 8:43 PM on September 12, 2015 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: @ryanrs I'm fine with videos that include mistakes/typos. I just need the video to be of someone actually doing something on the command line. I looked through the vi and speed programming videos just now. I think it's close but the parts where they use the command line are very small (usually just 1-2 seconds), but that seems like a promising direction to keep digging.

Thanks @smcameron for the link but I am just looking for command line usage, and it has to be a real task.
posted by tasty at 8:55 PM on September 12, 2015

The introduction to Tron: Legacy has something that would maybe work, but it's very brief. It's a real task (grepping for a process and killing it). He's using eshell in Emacs instead of a normal shell because the production designer decided it looked cooler. It's fast because the character is under extreme time pressure.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:59 PM on September 12, 2015

To expand on what ryans said:
Working on the command line rewards being deliberate, because it's easy to make a mistake that'll absolutely ruin your day. Any time saved by typing quickly and performing actions in rapid succession may turn out to be a false economy. "rm -rf *~" removes all files ending with '~', which are automatically-created backups. "rm-rf * ~" removes everything in your current directory. Hope you made backups. Once you've hit Enter, it's over.

vogon_poet's example task is one that I do all the time, but even there, going fast and typoing on the pid can be ... problematic. If you're lucky, it's one that's not in use. If you're unlucky, you'll take down your whole machine.
posted by Metasyntactic at 10:00 PM on September 12, 2015

The television show Mr. Robot (on USA channel) has frequent shots of real commands being entered into the *nix command line. I can't nail down a particular episode or timestamp from memory but if you start watching from the beginning it won't take long to see one.
posted by komara at 10:03 PM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

"rm-rf * ~" removes everything in your current directory.

This quote, in fact, is a perfect illustration of why you don't type quickly on the command line, or even while posting about the command line on metafilter. Metasyntactic, that command is innocuous, but the one I think you meant to type is far, far worse than you claimed.
posted by ryanrs at 10:45 PM on September 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Archer S06E06 actually has a gag about this; someone is forcing Sterling Archer to do some command line stuff on a mainframe and Archer starts peck-typing; Archer's kidnapper then starts giving him shit about being really slow and insinuating that he's terrible with a keyboard and insinuating that Archer is a hyperinflated blowupdoll of a secret agent.

Archers reply:
"Sorry, I don't want to mess up."

The first Matrix film might have some clips that you could use, though. Several scenes of simulated "hacking" with a command line-like interface.
posted by porpoise at 11:10 PM on September 12, 2015

The second Matrix film has just this when Trinity breaks into the powerplant and turns off the power grid. I think it's just a few commands, but she uses an authentic Unix exploit iirc.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:43 AM on September 13, 2015

Been a couple months since I watched it, but I seem to recall that the first episode (more than the others) of the current* USA show Mr. Robot had a bit of this. This episode was widely released online and premiered at a few film festivals and such a couple months before the show began, but I don't see an obvious legit release after a quick search.

*The 10th and find episode of this season aired last week.
posted by Sunburnt at 2:12 AM on September 13, 2015

Not sure what the OP wants to see. The visuals of the command line in any operating system are pretty mundane: You enter a command at the prompt, the command executes, and the prompt returns. Many traditional Unix apps don't display any output if they execute successfully.

A few variations on that theme exist -- a long-duration command told to execute in the background so the user gets the prompt back is probably the most common -- but it's always just text on a screen. Any visual fireworks will come from a *GUI-ified" app launched at the command line. Of course, at that point, you are no longer using the command line.
posted by justcorbly at 5:55 AM on September 13, 2015

To follow up on ryanrs: "rm -rf *~" is as described (but the -r is unnecessary for regular files vs. directories); "rm-rf * ~" is innocuous because of the missing space; but "rm -rf * ~" deletes everything in your current working directory and your user's home directory!

What separates a command-line ninja from a novice has little to do with arcane shortcuts or typing/editing very quickly (unlike vim), and more to do with combining a wide variety of tools, like shell loops and arithmetic, specialized core utilities like tr, grep, xargs, find, or uniq (some of which are complex enough to have their own quirks and idioms), and even small inline awk, perl, or Python scripts to accomplish seemingly complicated tasks in an ad hoc fashion.
posted by musicinmybrain at 6:18 AM on September 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

You might want to look at the people who do "live coding" for music, art and animation, where they will often have a screen displaying the coding activity. See the TOPLAP site and this talk.
posted by Jabberwocky at 9:16 AM on September 13, 2015

While it's not exaaactly what you're looking for, you might appreciate Tavis Rudd's presentation from Strange Loop 2012 where he programs in Clojure using voice control.

Otherwise: musicinmybrain hit the nail on the head.
posted by silentbicycle at 4:47 PM on September 13, 2015

Many episodes of Criminal Minds will show Penelope Garcia typing madly and opening windows and accessing databases, hardly a mouse click in sight. Not in any way realistic, but it looks very flash.
posted by lhauser at 8:04 PM on September 13, 2015