Level 1 - Bashcrawl
Last updated
Last updated
You may have heard of Colossal Cave Adventure, 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 Bashcrawl, 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 directories, you examine files with ls -F, read files with cat, set variables 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.
Before you can play Bashcrawl, you must have Bash or Zsh on your system. Linux, BSD, and MacOS ship with Bash included. Windows users can download and install Cygwin or WSL or try Linux.
To install Bashcrawl, download this file into your home folder. Find it in the Finder and double click to unpack it.
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.
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.
If you fail to read the README file, the game wins by default (although it can't tell you that because you won't have played it).
