Maybe she hadn't used fsn ever but could tell from the file system structure that it was in fact a UNIX system. Then she concluded that she need to find the correct file - which is how UNIX does things.

I did find the scene ridiculous at the time but it was because I didn't know UNIX or fsn. Now I find it very plausible.

Exactly, I cringed at that scene.

I'd be surprised if there weren't more than a few HN users who'd installed a Linux distribution by age 12.

Probably not when the movie came out in '93 tho. The easiest Linux install was a sad chore until at least '95 or '96.

Not strictly true, really. Ygddrasil was a bootable Linux distro on a CD which was available during the '93/'94 period .. I was always pretty sad that they stopped the project. It could've been a contender ..

But...her grandfather clones dinosaurs. Why is so beyond belief that she'd have used Unix at some point?

Because it's a click-and-point graphical 3D maze-like diagram thing.

If she'd piped ps through grep into kill then nobody would have ever mentioned it again.

shrug I was using one of the first versions of Slackware at that time. I can't remember exactly how easy it was to use as it has been a while. Probably I'm just blocking it from memory as it was Slackware :P.

"The easiest Linux install was a sad chore"

It really wasn't that bad - not quite as super slick as OS installs these days but most of the grief tended to come from having to do things like install it from a stack of floppy disks.