I was going to let this thread die, but this is just too much fun. :-)

then you suggest using a USB keyring drive - as if file systems are all that portable

Well you could have 2, 1 vfat and one ext2; that would get you onto most systems. You could also carry around a bootable cd like knoppix, so you can boot systems anyway you want.

crawl under the table to remove the device, crawl under another table to put the stick in the different box,

Hackers need exercise.

we're talking about find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

So I'm supposed to memorize that to save me .1 seconds? The shell programmers who threw that out as a solution didn't even remember the nulls right, and I'm supposed to? Let's see, was that -print0 | xargs -0 OR -print 0 | -xargs0 ? Did I need that funny {} or not, damn, I could have finished already if I just wrote it in Perl.!

Why would you juggle shells?

Why do you climb under tables?

I'm just having fun with you, sorry. I, like probably most computer hackers, deal with 1 or 2 computers until their control. A desktop and a laptop. If you have a job, or the need to be moving from one machine to another, without root priviledges, then it pays to have memorized those bash shell 1-liners. But for most of us, we can use our ~/bin directories to store our perl scripts.