~/tutorials/015-the-hunt.md

015: The hunt

This is the last lesson, and it teaches nothing new. Everything you need, you already read.

The skills, named

You have them all now, so call them what they are:

• Reading what came back instead of what you hoped for. Lesson one, and still the one that matters most.
• Knowing that the pages are files, the files are real, and cat shows what the page hides. Lessons two and nine.
• Walking a tree and spelling an address. Lesson six.
• Finding by name with find, finding by content with grep, and knowing which question you are asking. Lesson seven.
• Reading a port list as claims and a version answer as data. Lesson twelve.
• Believing the footer that says where an answer came from. Lesson thirteen.
• Counting with a pipe instead of trusting a number in prose. Lesson five, used by every lesson since.

Seven skills, and not one of them is a tool. The tools were how you picked the skills up.

The one habit

Ask the machine. Every question in these lessons had one command that answered it, and the answer was always allowed to disagree with the lesson. Numbers go stale, trees grow, snapshots age. The lesson you can check is the only kind worth writing, and the site you can interrogate is the only kind worth reading.

The hunt

Here is what you know: this tree keeps a few secrets, quietly, the way a machine does. Nothing announces them. Nothing counts them for you. The manifesto told you the filesystem goes deeper than the part you can see, and some of it is not going to volunteer itself.

That sentence is not a riddle, and there will not be another hint. You have ls -a, find, grep, cat, a port scanner with a script engine, a zone that answers for one name, and a file that records what you find. That is more than enough. When something odd turns up, and something will, you will know what to do with it.

Good hunting.