about

Orient yourself: OS/distro, shell, and how to look around — Cosmopolitan APE universal binary.

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About The Project

One command to answer: what machine is this, and how do I look around?

Drop into a random Linux box via wsl, SSH, a container, or a teammate’s laptop, and the discovery story is a mess. about prints the orientation facts first, then a short cheat sheet of the commands that actually help on this OS family.

Under Nushell, the cheat sheet switches to structured nu idioms. Outside Nushell, you still get the full classic tip sheet — plus a nudge to install nu. Nushell is never required; about always runs.

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Built With

• Language

  • 

• Portability

  • (APE universal binary)

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Getting Started

make
./about

Install onto PATH:

sudo make install    # PREFIX=/usr/local by default
about

Actually Portable Executable (recommended release artifact)

make ape             # downloads cosmocc into .cosmocc/ on first run
./about.com

Usage

about                 # facts + discovery tips (nu-aware)
about tar             # short orientation card for a command
about -q              # facts only
about --tips          # tips only
about --nu            # force Nushell tip sheet
about --classic       # force classic tip sheet + Nushell nudge
about --format nuon   # structured record (pipe: about --format nuon | from nuon)
about --version

What it reports

• OS / distro, kernel + architecture

• Environment: native, WSL2, container hints

• Hostname, user, home, cwd

• Shell and terminal detection

• Platform-specific "look around" commands

Related

• shell-architecture — OpenShellOrg thesis

• prohelp — progressive help + global help

• nu-require — require / relaunch under Nushell

See CHANGELOG.adoc.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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Contact

Open Shell Org — openshell@devcentr.org

• Project: https://github.com/openshellorg/about

• Site: https://openshellorg.github.io

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