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Ask HN: What do you need to know to be good at the Unix Command Line?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you need to know to be good at the Unix Command Line?

#11

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

solardev wrote: post #6

IMO: These days, it's hard to see a reason for learning this stuff by rote memorization when ChatGPT is already so, so good at it. You just give it a sample few lines from your text file and tell it what you need the output as, and it'll break down every command and parameter for you, whether that's a complex regex or a bunch of piped commands. Man pages in (in its training), results out, all expressed in natural lan…

Yup, replace learning the syntax of tools with learning how to ask ChatGPT what a command is in English. I've found sometimes it will take a few tries for it to a working answer. I don't care if its sed or awk or grep or whatever as long as I accomplish the goal of what I want to be done.

Re: Ask HN: What do you need to know to be good at the Unix Command Line?

#12

Post by more_corn »

Manipulating text files is probably not enough. This is what I usually teach:

1) learn the parts of the command including long and short versions of options(command, options arguments) 2) learn how to execute commands and troubleshoot (which, ls -al, chmod, etc) 3) learn to chain commands with the pipe (grep, sort, awk, sed, wc and grep -c, learn the common misuse of cat since most commands you’re passing to take a filename argument) 4) learn about history, reverse history search, history shortcuts like !! And !:1, tab completion

The way I do this is to have students set up a raspberry pi and ssh into it. There’s a lot of fiddling and troubleshooting involved and it builds good practice.

You should also probably teach command line tool access in vi for processing huge files visually e.g :%! grep

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