I was going through the Ruby on Rails documentation, digging into guides on asset compilation and routing, when I stumbled across an example that used the Unix command ls -la
. I understood that ls
lists files and directories, but didn't know what -la
is. Rather than breaking my flow by alt-tabbing to a browser or hunting through Stack Overflow threads, I paused and thought, “Why can’t I just ask my terminal directly, without leaving my shell?”