Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?

Is there a great book or online tutorial for all things command line?

I came to answer your question and say that when I started computing there was only the command line - there were no windows, effectively no graphics, and the only thing you could do was type commands.

But then you ask if there are tutorials, and that I can't help you with. Having said that, I tried this search:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=command+line+tutorial

and I got lots of hits, including these:

* http://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/command-line/

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8170/best-windows-command...

* http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/cli.html

I'm not a beginner on the command line, so I can't assess how well they meet your needs.

I am not a command line pro either but whatever limited experience i have came from working from mercurial and from college unix lectures. I would suggest you incorporate command line in some of your routine work (source control for example).

I 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 also really like using the 'move-cursor-a-word-left/right' and 'move-cursor-to-end/beginning-of-line' and 'move-cursor-to-top/bottom-of-textarea' functions you can find in almost every GUI.

Finally, I use Spotlight to load all my applications: I hit cmd-space and then it's usually 1 key to load my most commonly used applications, and generally 3-4 in worst case.

My suggestion: use the Terminal for everything: Learn to edit text files in emacs or vi, use a command line SQL browser, do source control from the command line, and learn sed, awk, and cut (plenty of tutorials out there). Use the keyboard in the browser and in GUI textareas as much as possible.

Here is a neat site which has turned up in a few of my Google searches: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

Finally, shameless self-plug, I have been using this simple piece of code every day for a couple of years, a command-line (tab-completed) notebook for bash: https://github.com/nchelluri/notes .

HTH.

Edit: I keep looking at this page every few months, but it never seems to be compatible with my version of Firefox: http://paulrouget.com/e/jsterm/ :(

$ man man # best way to start

I could also recommend TUPE[1], it teaches you how to effectively use the command line and write shell scripts.

1. The Unix Programming Environment by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike.