ks

ks .k is one of the most common typos to exasperate unixish sysadmins. If you've used a unixish command line extensively, you already *know* what you were trying to type the last dozen or so times you ks'd.

Usually, I'm opposed to using fuzzy logic to parse the command line. It's dangerous - installing or removing a package could change the dataset that the fuzzy matcher is using, leading to the command 'dwarf' accidentally starting a DWARF core dump analyser instead of a best-of-breed ecosystem and epidemiology simulator. But there are times when the help provided by fuzzy systems is useful - very few of us would enjoy using a shell that behaved differently for ls -l and ls   -l. So, I've written a programlet to turn 'ks' into the command you obviously MEANT to type. It parses the arguments for you, understands --, and even helpfully converts .k into -l (assuming .k is before --, as anyone typing ks -- .k probably actually wanted to operate on the file .k). Given that ks only corrects the arguments for a single commonly-mistyped command, and that the effects of that command are mostly harmless, I can see no downside to installing it.

Okay, enough blather. To use ks, you will need:

perl. If you're trying to run a perl-free system, contact me and I'll rewrite it in something friendlier.

sl. You may or may not have it installed; apt-get install sl will install it on Debianish systems.

ks.tar.gz, which you will need to decompress by hand and drop into /usr/local/bin (or wherever you like to keep such things.)