What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
  • @[email protected]
    22•1 month ago

    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!

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 month ago

      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

    • Tlaloc_Temporal
      10•1 month ago

      ‘ls’ is an abbreviation for ‘list’, not an acronym. Like copy -> cp, and the other keystroke saving abbreviations.

  • EugeniaEnglish
    3•1 month ago

    Step 1: Use a youtube tutorial for the basic commands. Don’t worry, you’ll forget about them soon enough. But doing them once, helps with muscle memory.

    Step 2: When in need to do something, copy/paste from Q&A/forums various commands that they suggest for your problem. Your basic knowledge from step1 will come back as you do that.

    After a few days, you’ll be understanding what’s going on and how the whole thing works in an abstract level.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 month ago

      I would recommand to never copy paste but retype so you have the commands on your finger memory.

      Also don’t be afraid to --help everything. It give more option for commands you know quicker than the man.

  • Tekhne
    6•1 month ago

    Maybe controversial, but the fish shell. I know it’s not strictly bash syntax, but the OOTB features are just so user-friendly. The most helpful features for learning: the autocomplete (with descriptions of subcommands and flags!) and the fuzzy history search.

    I write bash scripts all the time, and am significantly more knowledgeable than anyone else on my team (admittedly frontend) because I got comfortable in fish.

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 month ago

      I use Fish sometimes, even when I know exactly what I need to type, but just don’t feel like having to type out entire file names.

  • @[email protected]
    2•1 month ago

    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.

  • Snot FlickermanEnglish
    27•1 month ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      16•1 month ago

      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…”

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 month ago

    Knowing:

    • pwd, ls, cd, cat/less, cp, mv, rm, rmdir, rm -rf, ls -lah
    • command --help
    • man command | grep thing I care about
    • bonus points if you have tldr command installed