[Discuss] learn or teach programs

Mike Small smallm at panix.com
Thu Jan 16 12:39:51 EST 2014


Was re-reading The Unix Programming Environment by K&P. In the first
chapter it suggests you look for a program named learn or teach on your
system. It's a program that gives you interactive lessons on the Unix
command line as well as some tools like vi and ms troff macros. It's
sort of like the emacs tutorial but for Unix, in that you get Unix
prompts to play with within the exercises.

I don't have such a thing on my home system (OpenBSD), but panix's
NetBSD system seems to still have one named learn by John Kunze. This is
all I could find on the web about it:
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/pups/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/usr/src/usr.bin/learn/
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/pups/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/usr/src/share/learn/
Unless I've missed something it's not in NetBSD's tree or in pkgsrc,
however, so I don't know how panix came by it. I don't see anything in
debian either:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=learn&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=all
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=teach&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=all

Does anyone know the history of this or similar programs and why they
didn't make it into this decade (or did they)?  Did any Linux distro
ever have one? It strikes me as something that still ought to exist and
at least be available using the package manager, if not be in the base
system or core packages.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at panix.com



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