Level 1 - Bashcrawl

You may have heard of Colossal Cave Adventurearrow-up-right, an old text-based, interactive game in the style of "choose your own adventure" books. Early computerists played these obsessively at the DOS or ProDOS command line, struggling to find the right combination of valid syntax and zany fantasy logic (as interpreted by a sardonic hacker) to beat the game. Imagine how productive such a struggle could be if the challenge, aside from exploring a virtual medieval dungeon, was to recall valid Bash commands. That's the pitch for Bashcrawlarrow-up-right, a Bash-based dungeon crawl you play by learning and using Bash commands.

In Bashcrawl, a "dungeon" is created in the form of directories and files on your computer. You explore the dungeon by using the cd command to change directory into each room of the dungeon. As you proceed through directoriesarrow-up-right, you examine files with ls -Farrow-up-right, read files with catarrow-up-right, set variablesarrow-up-right to collect treasure, and run scripts to fight monsters. Everything you do in the game is a valid Bash command that you can use later in real life, and playing the game provides Bash practice because the "game" is made out of actual directories and files on your computer.

Install Bashcrawl

Before you can play Bashcrawl, you must have Bash or Zsharrow-up-right on your system. Linux, BSD, and MacOS ship with Bash included. Windows users can download and install Cygwinarrow-up-right or WSLarrow-up-right or try Linuxarrow-up-right.

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To install Bashcrawl, download this file into your home folder. Find it in the Finder and double click to unpack it.

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276KB
DOWNLOAD BASHCRAWL HERE!!

Getting started

As with almost any new software package you download, the first thing you must do is read the README file. You can do this by double-clicking on the README.txt file in the bashcrawl directory.

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README.txt tells you exactly how to start playing the game, including how to get to the game in your terminal and the first command you must issue to start the game.

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