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Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#52Find a mentor or an irc chatroom. My sophomore roommate knew a ton. I annoyed him to no end w/ questions (many RTFM comments…). A lot of the commands aren't named obviously, though the 'apropos' command may help.
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#53What is it you want to do? Just learn or do something with it? You won't learn something like that by reading. You have to actually use a terminal to accomplish things. Often.
Start using linux and develop something. You'll use about 3 terminal instances all the time. That's the way to learn.
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#54This is a good book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013308504X/ref=oh_details_o...
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#55Download linux on your computer(Mint or Ubuntu id recommend). Then look up the basic commands and use them (ls, cd ...). Then move on to making your own aliases(search up 'making bash aliases'). By this point you can now start trying some more advanced things like having aliases which start up programs and open your project folders(search up 'dotfiles bash'). Lastly learning some shell script can help you better understand and utilize the terminal(as you can write complex shell scripts for your aliases).
As a side note using vim(or emacs) as your default text editor will keep you in the terminal longer helping you get used to using it.
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#56I started in DOS watching over my brother's shoulder. (There was no GUI back then.) I used to make batch files and such. Eventually I grew to love bash. I am sure there are plenty of keyboard shortcuts I don't know, but I find using the command line to be quicker than any other form of communicating with the computer. I use keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and occasionally dream of an Awesome Bar that works like bash.…
>I use keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and occasionally dream of an Awesome Bar that works like bash.
This reminded me to check up on Ubiquity[1]. Mozilla doesn't even host a page for it anymore, but apparently someone adopted it[2]. I'm going to have to play around with this tomorrow; I'll be happy if it's half as useful as I remember.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_%28Firefox%29 [2]: https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/overview
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#57> how did you learn the command line?
I grew up with it
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#58> Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
I had no choice -- for most of my computing career, there wasn't anything else. in fact, when I first got into computing, I would have sold my left arm to gain access to a command line interface.
When I see a typical modern command line (a shell session), it's enclosed in a separate window, and I'm reminded how far we've come in a short time.
Before I had access to a terminal, I was writing programs anyway --
http://arachnoid.com/programmable_calculators
-- and my first terminal's output (while working for NASA in the early 1970s) was a roll of paper.
So that's my answer -- I had no choice.
Oh, p.s., here's my Bash tutorial:
Re: Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?
#59In 1995, all we had at university had was a bunch of SunOS & HP-UX workstations. Yes, they had X, mwm and (later) CDE, but you just had to learn the command line to do anything particularly useful. Man pages, a few of the IT service's leaflets (How to use troff/LaTeX), searching the web (Altavista! Dogpile! Webcrawler!) and asking in Usenet groups when I hit a real roadblock. I started building small shell scripts out of need to automate some things, and learned about the shell environment and the overall Unix philosophy doing that.
This was over a period of years rather than weeks or months - I probably can't say that I was proficient on the CLI until around 1999 when I really started getting stuck into Linux and building everything from scratch. I find that young developers today expect to learn everything immediately, expecting a one-true-way to wisdom, rather than accepting that true mastery seeps in over time, largely through doing and getting things wrong. So, experiment, and don't give up when you can't figure out something immediately.