about CLI

about is a command for the CLI that orients you on a machine you didn’t set up — OS, shell, environment, and a short cheat sheet of ways to look around on that OS family.

When you’re in Nushell, those tips speak nu (sys, $env, ls, …). When you’re not, you still get the full classic tip sheet, plus a nudge to install nu. Nushell is never required; about always runs.

Why

Drop into a random Linux box via wsl, SSH, a container, or a teammate’s laptop, and the discovery story is a mess: /etc/os-release (sometimes), uname, sw_vers, systeminfo, $SHELL vs ps -p $$, WSL env vars that only exist on good days…

about prints the orientation facts first, then a short cheat sheet of the commands that actually help on this OS family.

Quick start

make
./about

Install onto PATH:

sudo make install    # PREFIX=/usr/local by default
about

Actually Portable Executable

Release builds use Cosmopolitan Libc to produce an Actually Portable Executable — one fat binary for Linux, macOS, Windows, and BSDs (amd64 + arm64).

make ape
./about.com

See Building for WSL and CI notes.