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The little things, syntax.

Berry Langley
3 min readJan 17, 2022

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Photo by Pierre Châtel-Innocenti on Unsplash

“Click”

The sound right before the lightbulb turns on or that sound in my head just as I finally grasp some small commandline idiosyncrasy.

I have had many discussions recently with my daughter, Hallie, (MS Computer Science, BS Math, BS Physics, Java Developer extraordinaire) regarding the struggles I have at times with basic commandline syntax. It’s always some little piece of knowledge missing regarding just how and where things should go. She says, I am jumping too far forward too fast in my learning and that is my issue. I have core, basic, level knowledge gaps. She is likely right. But I also think there is an alternative path based upon needs.

I don’t “need” to typically have to be able to craft from scratch some new forensic tool to delve into the datasets I come across. I do need to be able to leverage the plethora of tools already out there to better accomplish my mission. It might be just learning the syntax of a tool, or possibly modifying a script I found on GitHub. (Ugh, yet another skill I need to learn, forking a GitHub repository, and then giving back my efforts.) I learned more about leveraging PowerShell from Mark Hallman’s GitHub than from anywhere else. It took me a good long while to create a script that would run all the EZ tool’s against a mounted image but I did it.

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Berry Langley
Berry Langley

Written by Berry Langley

Forensic analyst, who is living his dream.

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