I don't consider myself in any elite minority for it, but I feel I have strong familiarity with everything on that list. While maybe a bit of curating might be necessary, _every_ developer whose code comes anywhere near a Unix descendant should be just as familiar to be considered anything above 'junior'. Most teenagers are perfectly capable of this understanding.
I find my job wearing a DevOps hat to be very often much more difficult than it ought to be because so many programmers clearly don't understand the OS layer they're running on (both when supporting internal developers at various places which I've called $work, and using OSS and commercial software in that role)
There's no shame in running `man xargs` to get the syntax just right (we're not dictionaries) but general knowledge of what those tools are and how to use them are _essential_ to being a good developer... this is an essence too often neglected by universities and professionals.
I agree completely. My point was when I looked at the list the first thing that jumped out at me was dig... yeah, I know what dig is, what it's used for, but I just hadn't seen it in a while... that's how often I actually have to use it. There isn't a reason for me to really keep it in my mental dictionary of known commands because of it's overall utility to me. Likewise commiting logrotate flags to memory, pretty much useless, how often do you honestly have to run that by hand or use it in a day in day out situation. If you answer "often" to that, then we'll need to get you up to speed on more core components like crons and shell scripts.
>There's no shame in running `man xargs` to get the syntax just right (we're not dictionaries) but general knowledge of what those tools are and how to use them are _essential_ to being a good developer... this is an essence too often neglected by universities and professionals.
I don't really think so. You can get by fine developing a lot of things without knowing linux tools. They are helpful, though. What if you're working on Windows like a ton of devs do?
It's always good to have a diverse set of skills, but I meant (and said somewhere) the things I said for those whose code ever runs on nix. I also don't just mean a mastery of the commandline tools but also how various pieces of a nix system run (most recently my irritation has come from bad logging) and general Unix philosophy.
I find my job wearing a DevOps hat to be very often much more difficult than it ought to be because so many programmers clearly don't understand the OS layer they're running on (both when supporting internal developers at various places which I've called $work, and using OSS and commercial software in that role)
There's no shame in running `man xargs` to get the syntax just right (we're not dictionaries) but general knowledge of what those tools are and how to use them are _essential_ to being a good developer... this is an essence too often neglected by universities and professionals.