The Unix Game: Learn Basic Unix Commands and Programming Online

For most users, a small detail goes unnoticed: Unix just turned 50 years old. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge, and its family tree, so to speak, is truly impressive, which means one thing: if you master its essentials, many doors will open for you. To celebrate, members of Nokia Bell Labs presented a mini portal called Unix50 and a series of challenges under the name The Unix Game, which you'll need to solve by applying basic Linux commands and a touch of Scratch-style programming.

If you're interested in learning the basic commands of a terminal, you'll quickly discover that the available documentation is not very friendly. The best way to receive this knowledge is through someone with years of experience as a 'keyboard rider'. A good command of the terminal is useful for different reasons, but the first thing it teaches us is that there is a whole world behind the graphical interface, ready to be explored.

Now, if you prefer to follow the self-taught route, I'm not going to stop you, but you might want to take a closer look at The Unix Game especially if your relationship with terminals is nonexistent. The site seems a bit intimidating at first, however, everything becomes clearer once we follow the official tour. At the top we see the challenge bar we must overcome. On the left we have the description of each challenge, at the bottom we find the questions to answer, on the right appears the "programming zone" with a design almost identical to the Scratch language, and in the lower right corner is the console.

Let's take the first question of the 'Hello World' challenge. The goal is to extract the last name of each person in the list, and present the data in alphabetical order. The idea is that you click on the 'Commands' section of the programming zone, and look for something there that is useful in the challenge. The 'cut' command already takes care of choosing the column with the last names, and all you have to do is drag the 'sort' command block to place it below 'cut'. Success! You've climbed the first step.

The second question requires selecting the first two lines of the last names list, and for the final phase of Hello World, something a bit more complicated: counting the number of times the same name repeats, and organizing the results from highest to lowest. Sometimes the game gives us a hint, and in this case, the first line should be 'Joe', which repeats three times.

There are different ways to complete those objectives using the terminal. In fact, more experienced users complained on the Web about the possibility of typing commands directly… but that is not the point. Moreover, The Unix Game is not meant for them, or otherwise it wouldn't adopt a structure similar to Scratch. At first, it was mandatory to create an account or use Facebook credentials to continue, however, a wave of protests led the creators to incorporate an anonymous game mode, without logins or entering information. Don't hesitate to try it!

Official site: Click here