Out of curiosity, what happens if you image the laptop drive and boot it under VirtualBox (keeping the Linux host offline, so the Windows guest can’t phone home)? Potentially useful: https://superuser.com/questions/614400/how-can-i-clone-a-hard-drive-directly-to-a-vdi-image

Yep!

Apologies

deleted by creator

It’s not about looking it up or not, it’s a challenge to the boasting of the commenter above me in the context of the OP’s post.

Very close! -R, either, -R, -r, -r, -r. I typically think “-R except for ssh-related”, but zip violates that and I’m sure there are plenty of other counterexamples too. On the topic of ssh, I still can’t keep -p or -P straight (ssh vs scp).

With ls you can list the contents of directories recursively. Or you can list the contents in reverse order. One of them requires a lowercase “r”, one requires uppercase, but which is which? It’s not such a big deal that different commands have inconsistent syntax, but even having run Linux as my primary OS since 2004, and before that Unix since 1993, I still have to look these up sometimes.

A couple more challenges:

• As an unprivileged user, append multiple lines to a file owned by root, using sudo and a here document.
• Redirect both stdout and stderr to a file using Bourne shell syntax (not bash!)

For recursive behavior, tell me if each of these requires -r or -R (or either) without looking at the man page or --help:

• chown
• cp
• ls
• rsync
• scp
• zip

Comment could have been a :q!

With any conspiracy theory I ask myself “Would I be able to do anything about it even if it were true?”. So far the answer has always been “No”. Therefore, I feel it’s pointless for me to let myself get upset or waste time and emotional energy on them when I could instead be doing something else.