Political map of continent, Flapjackia, showing countries of Shellvarnia, Environmentopia, and Userland.

This is a fun short story about the fictional land of Shellvarnia, located Down Unix, that occurred to me one night while I was reading Brian Ward‘s excellent book, How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know. Mixing one dash of political satire with a heaping serving of Unix lore, it will entertain and inform novices approaching a Linux VM for the first time.  If you’ve ever wondered about distinctions between local shell variables and environment variables, /bin/sh from /bin/csh, and who built that wall between Shellvarnia and Environmentopia, then this story was written just for you.  Continue reading →