You're right about all of that up until the point any one of those commands doesn't work and you get a garglblargl amount of incomprehensible error messages. You've been in the sauce for so long that you've forgotten what it's like to start fresh in these things.
Please give it a try before you assume it won't work? Tell me what platform you're on and follow the three sequential cli commands I provided, and if it doesn't compile I'll be glad to look at your error message and get it going in the right direction.