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- cross-posted to:
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To things that helps no mater your skill level the tab key is your best friend and man pages are great but if those are overwhelming install the package tldr then you can use the command tldr and the command you are trying to run to give you helpful examples of how to use that command.
Also old users don’t remember long commands if we use a command more than once. You save it to your bash alias file to create your own commands.
Also old users don’t remember long commands if we use a command more than once. You save it to your bash alias file to create your own commands.
A good example for this is docker compose -f when you work alot if compose files ! Having an alias for docker compose -f as
dcfsaves hours a month xDtldr is great, sometimes you can’t remember the exact syntax for a certain command and just need a quick reminder as well.
In my experience repetition helped. Not memorization, but more like muscle memory.
Also, ensuring to never copy and paste commands but to type them in manually yourself. It’s hard to enforce this on yourself, but worth it.
I appreciate that this article started with “ways to reduce risk” because that’s an extremely valid concern and tied to why you shouldn’t ever copy and paste. The one time in my early Linux forays where I copied and pasted I wiped the wrong drive. It definitely taught me to always manually type it in and not get too lazy, because what you copied might not match what you want to do exactly.
Also, ensuring to never copy and paste commands but to type them in manually yourself. It’s hard to enforce this on yourself, but worth it.
“Command: sido not found…”
As a fan of german rap this gave me a good chuckle. Thx.
I set it so when I hit CTRL-Tilde it drops down from the top of the screen.
Quake-style, baby.
CTRL-tilde or CTRL-backtick?
Yes
The need to do it plus the realization that you can script anything based on it.
Drivers. Using recovery mode. Administration. Wanting to describe what to do rather then manually do it. Wild cards are really powerful and so is find and xargs. The text processing commands are useful too.
The other thing is having started computing in the 1970s. Everything was command line back then. GUI systems only become universal in about 1995.
Stumbled across a game that teaches the command line as you play it. Seems like a good place to share https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl
personally, writing and saving simple scripts - IE project based learning - is how i got time in the saddle.
Practice.
What helps me is to understand what commands acronym means. For instance cp for copy, mkdir for make directory, blkid for block id, ls for list (not too sure about actual meaning for s) and so on!
Nice tips about ctrl+r to search in command history. Was not aware it existed!
‘ls’ is an abbreviation for ‘list’, not an acronym. Like copy -> cp, and the other keystroke saving abbreviations.
pwd for password, man for mansplain, and dd for destroy disk
Hey, the first two don’t sound quite right
works for common flags too, like in
df -h, the h stands for human readable, I always find myself mumbling “human” while typing that one
I have no clue… I grew up on Windows 3.11 and I thought Windows was kinda lame while MS-DOS was the coolest thing ever because you typed things like magic spells 😅
This right here (more or less - first home PC was Win95, but it still relied pretty heavily on DOS, esp for games). I loved the RPGs where you typed in your actions, too.
if the avg enduser has to temper in a commandline, your program is ass.
Practice I guess. Especially using cli for specific tasks that is done more efficiently on there than the gui.
Moving files using regex for example is useful. Or finding files with specific phrases in them. Stuff like that
Virtual environment? Taking notes of what they did?
Anyway, tell them it’s okay you experiment and mess things up. Show them how to backup their important work. Then walk them through inevitably having to reinstall their distro.
They’ll learn that you can just keep moving forward, fixing and learning as you go.
I think just doing it more, and thinking it’s cool to interact more directly. At least that helps me. I do feel bad for dyslexic peiple though, it’s a lot harder for them to use CLI.
Yeah that was it for me. Just keep regular backups and bear in mind that you’ll probably break stuff at first. But once you get the hang of it, it’s like a whole other level of control over your system.
Also I’m not dyslexic but would things like tab completion and aliases help maybe? I sometimes shorten often-used commands with aliases just for convenience (as an example, I use
rsynca lot, particularly the commandrsync --ignore-existing -ravwhich I just shorten torsto save time) so maybe that could also be used to avoid mis-spelling?Thats a good idea, i have not made any aliases yet. Also remembering all of those aliases is another challenge ha. I keep a text file named commands on my desktop with a whole bunch of commands I forget.
I have some mapped to super simple aliases too like
e1to reboot,e2to shutdown etc. I don’t remember why I started doing that, but that way I only have to remember which number does what lol.
Play around in a virtual machine so you don’t have to worry about messing anything up. Start with the basics such as navigating through directories and creating, editing, and moving files. If you break something, just restore a snapshot.
Or just use Time Shift or a similar tool. I broke my first linux install like a dozen times, and I learned so much about how my computer operates in the process.
The way I usually start teaching using the console to my (very much non-tech) students is set up a safe container and then let them type whatever, invariably generating a lot of error messages. Then I challenge them to generate different error messages, “gotta catch em all” style. Then we talk about the error messages and what they might mean. After this exercise they usually get the basic idea of command – response, what to look out for and how to compose valid commands.
That’s clever
Good cushions
I’m trying to make it a regular thing but my problem is I like to get my hands dirty by working on projects. The snag is that I get stuck a lot due to not knowing basics. My personality gets in the way = get dirty and learn fast(not necessarily shortcuts). Maybe I haven’t found that right source to learn that not too beginner and not too intermediate. Maybe a cool cluster of small projects to setup your computer then environment to setting up projects to do your everyday life takes to what you really want to learn.
