About CliWorks

CliWorks started as a private notebook. Every few weeks somebody on the team would lose half an afternoon to a problem that had already been solved in a shell history file - a flag that suppresses output, a way to move a directory without losing permissions, a command that reveals which process is holding a port. The notes were useful exactly once, to the person who wrote them.

How entries get written

One page answers one question. The question is usually phrased the way somebody actually hit it: "why is my pipe returning nothing", "how do I copy this tree without the build output". If a page starts needing a preamble, it is two pages.

Commands are run before publication. Entries state the version they were checked against, and where behaviour differs between distributions, that difference is called out rather than smoothed over.

What you will not find here

No packages, no archives, no build instructions for other people's software. Each entry names the upstream project and points at its own documentation. Where a tool is described as unsafe to run unattended, that note stays even when it makes the entry less attractive.

Corrections

Reports get reproduced before anything changes. If a note is wrong, it gets fixed; if it is right and the reader hit something else, that gets written too.