bash/memory.README.md

Shell memory questions

memory.tsv is a selectively curated question-and-answer bank for reinforcing useful Bash commands. It deliberately excludes internal functions, standard command overrides and deprecated transition aliases.

Each non-empty line contains three tab-separated fields:

name	question	answer

• name is a unique stable identifier, normally the command or alias name.
• question is displayed on shell startup.
• answer is displayed by running answerpls in that terminal.

Run refreshpls to advance to another question before the next calendar day. answerpls then displays the answer to the newly shown question. Refreshing is persisted under $XDG_STATE_HOME/bash (or ~/.local/state/bash when that variable is unset), so new terminals show the refreshed question for the rest of that calendar day. The normal daily selection takes over again the following day.

The file has no header or comments. Empty fields, duplicate names and malformed rows are errors.

Bash works through a persisted, randomly shuffled deck. Each question appears once before the deck is shuffled again, and a new deck does not begin with the question that ended the previous one. The deck advances on a new calendar day or when refreshpls is run, while every terminal opened on the same day shows the current persisted question. Editing the bank starts a newly shuffled deck.