Good bye Linux

A few weeks ago I gave up a Linux shell account I had for almost 7 years. It was/still is hosted in a data centre on a continent far far away. Little did I realise the realisations it would trigger.

The reason  for giving it up was quite straight forward. Too many email accounts/log-ins to juggle. Attachments were a mess to deal with and non of my relatives couldn’t understand why I didn’t open their many mega tonne attachment. Email via good old fashioned PINE was beyond their comprehension. Perhaps yours too. I blame no one for that.

I finally got around to archiving (taring and gzipping) all my files before downloading them to my Mac. Boiled down to nearly 12MB of compressed text files. Of which 10MB were emails in pure text format. 7 years of email mind you. Then emailed my aduie admin, did a last nostalgic look around with ls -alh of the now empty shell and logged out for the last time. No more secure shelling around the world to check my email.

The simple chore of backing up my old files and deleting them from the server became a stroll through the history of my UNIX command line education. My accounts configuration file (.rc file) has accumulated a shockingly large number of alias commands (also replicated on my Mac’s terminal). A majority of them designed to reduce complex commands down to one or two letters and a variable. I’m quite sure without this .rc file I’ll be stumbling around an UNIX shell account like a newbie. 

I remember spending too much time customising the colour scheme of the shell as well as the command line prompt. My collection of half baked shell scripts charted rambling forays of discovery in to the sprawling territory of shell scripting. Most of them designed to fetch data from annoyingly designed websites.

Now the only UNIX shell I have is the one on my own cheapo little mac. Email is reduced to free webmail. On the fly shell scripting does occur during lapses in the anti tinkering medication. 

Such is life.