Linux CLI 101

simply great article... should help alot for those that want to use linux but arent "experts" yet

Good article, where was it a year or two ago when i was trying to learn this stuff :D

Excellent article- really welcomed!

<A88>

Again, another great little Linux article...thanks!

A question for you Glider; if you had to recommend just one Linux reference book, which would it be?

Ooh! I've been using top for years, but hadn't heard of htop, which looks much nicer. Cheers for that.

wow, a cli guide thats made for those who dont know anything lol, why couldnt i have found that when i needed it more lol (not that i didnt find it useful). im hoping youve got some more linux articles planned.

i think this is a good article, as someone who doesn't need this help, i understood it thoroughly, however, for people who genuinely want to get stuck into this stuff, it kinda throws you in at the deep end, some friends i emailed this link to who genuinely do want ot learn some bash and basic unix/linux admin, emailed back asking what VMware is and what on earth we need that for to ssh into a linux box.

i found it very intuiive, but the style of writing is very reminiscent of linux geeks, assuming a lot of basic PC knowledge. Fair enough for a site like this i guess, but it will have a lto of people stumped at stage one i think.

do you really need to install VMware in order to learn bash? an unneccesary level of complication for an otherwise plain and simple guide.

Great article but I think there's a few things you should have mentioned:

1) If you want the power of bash on windows there's Cygwin
2) If you need help with most commands there's usually an option called --help (I think it would be useful to mention this as well as the man command at the very start)
3) Did you even mention command pipes? That's something that should be near the beginning too.
4) Grep is command I've found invaluable. You don't need to use regular expressions to use it if you don't want to but that power is always there if you need it.
5) And perhaps a mention of the find command. Windows is useless for searching for files and I always get confused by find so that would be useful
6) Command aliases can be very useful. For example I have one for ls which makes it default to ls -alrt

Sorry, I know you couldn't possibly cover everything (this list turned out longer than I expected). As I said, it's a great article!

hey guys, I just had to put a comment in here, mostly to djDeath and DeX. :)

First of all, thanks for the great comments, I'm glad to know that our linux articles are hitting a very often-missed target. Which leads me to -

As DeX said, you can't have EVERYTHING in here - or else it becomes more than just 101. Remember, DeX, the purpose of this first article is to familiarise yourself with how to move around, assuming you don't even know what "cd" means. Pipes, grep and aliases are all a bit out of the scope. Of course, that's what a CLI 102, 201, etc. are for... ;) So don't worry, we'll get there.

For DJ Death's comment, that was one reason LiveCD was mentioned in the very beginning. You can boot up using nothing but the Ubuntu guide, though VMWare Server makes for a little nicer (and I'd say cleaner) approach. That being said, you're right - an intro on how to install VMWare Server would not have gone amiss, though the basic steps are present. :)

This belongs in the software tab right?

Originally Posted by 1e8o
This belongs in the software tab right?

If only we had one...

Damn it. I should have checked and this would probably have been better in bits... or not?! Nm.

Doesn't "mv" stand for "move" which makes more sense then "copy and delete the original"?

Originally Posted by DougEdey
Doesn't "mv" stand for "move" which makes more sense then "copy and delete the original"?

True, but thats what it does. Some people find that easier to visualise.

Great article Glider!

I use Nautilus on my Ubuntu installation occasionally, but when I need to some serious file manipulation, I bring out ksh!

And then when things get really serious, that's when I fire up PERL...

Can we get a PERL 101?... :-)

Originally Posted by shaq
Can we get a PERL 101?... :-)

Then Ruby, Python, Java, C?

Originally Posted by Jamie
Then Ruby, Python, Java, C?

and what about PHP? (lol, what can I say, it rhymes B))

excellent article though, now maybeI'll be able to educate my friend on how to use the media server rather than always being at a loss and asking me. :(

Originally Posted by Jamie
Then Ruby, Python, Java, C?

Sorry I asked! :o

reason I mentioned it is that I've always found PERL really easy to use for more complex file manipulations...

It's also really easy to pick up.


Now Python I've heard good things about... I'm hoping to pick it up soon, so yes, a Python tutorial would be handy... :D

Originally Posted by riggs
Again, another great little Linux article...thanks!

A question for you Glider; if you had to recommend just one Linux reference book, which would it be?

A general Linux book, hmm, hard... My first tought (don't laugh) is Google... Linux' strength is it's great online documentation, certainly for a distro like Gentoo... If it isn't in the handbook or the wiki, you have some exotic stuff going on.

Originally Posted by DougEdey
Doesn't "mv" stand for "move" which makes more sense then "copy and delete the original"?

mv stands for move, but it does a copy & delete...

Originally Posted by Bluephoenix
and what about PHP? (lol, what can I say, it rhymes B))

PHP is about one of the nicest languages I've learned...

EDIT: @DeX, piping, grepping, sed, ... all usefull, all easy, but all require that you understand the basics first, basics being tree structure and the likes... The goal of this guide was a bare introduction, and I do mean bare ;)

interesting article, though I was already familiar with most of it... one thing though, I just ran into recently ... I was looking for a way to list files similar to the 'dir -p' structure with DOS .. thus I did ls -l .. however that doesn't break results into 'pages' ..i tried 'man ls' , however I failed to see any result-chopping arguements in there.. anyone got an idea about that?

It's something I've never worked out, there's nothing in the man page either. I just use page up/down to scroll results (sometimes hold down shift or ctrl to scroll)

Hmm, I don't think ls has such a switch... Don't even think ls is aware of terminal size...

ls | less

does the trick tough

Originally Posted by Article
and CD Rom drives are listed as just that - CDROM.

does this include the newer sata optical drives?

/dev/cdrom is a symlink created by udev towards the cdrom drive.

For example, on my laptop, /dev/hda is my primary drive, and /dev/hdc is my cdrom

laptop ~ # ls -al /dev/cdrom 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Sep  6 17:32 /dev/cdrom -> hdc

So yes, they should be there ;)

Originally Posted by Jamie

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1e8o
This belongs in the software tab right?

If only we had one...

Hahahah LOL, I just figured that there was a software tab :P didn't even look. And I'm allmost a 2 year member :D