Ask HN: how did you learn the command line?

My Windows laptop was outta commission for a few weeks in college. I could use the public computer labs to do my homework, but the only way I could do any programming was to SSH into remote UNIX boxes that I had access to and write the code directly on the server. (I was doing mostly PHP development at the time, and had laboriously setup PHP/Apache/MySQL on my Windows box until it died.) When your only window into the world is an SSH terminal, you pick up the command line and vim fairly quickly.

I can say how I started:

In 1997, a friend of mine came to visit, installed Debian 2.0 on my 486 with a unsupported Intel i740 videocard, showed me how to log in, 'man -k ' and 'man man', then said "See ya next week, have fun". And I had.

Know how to get help with specific topics.

(1) At the terminal, via

    man 

or

    apropos 

and (2) online by googling.

These are useful when you have a specific task you want to get done, not so much otherwise. Therefore,

(3) Try to do things at the command line that you would normally do via mouse. If you have no idea how, google or 'apropos'. If you learn of a tool and have no idea how to use it, google more or 'man'.

(3a) Do the simple stuff via the CLI--removing and moving files, examining directory contents, et cetera. (Be careful with rm! It will not warn you by default.)

(3b) More complex stuff too--try editing text with a terminal editor. Many people swear by emacs and vim. They have learning curves of their own but they are worth it. Pick one.

(4) Pipes and input redirection. Send the output of one command as the input to another, send the output to a file, etc. This is where your standard Unix shell gets really powerful.

The first computer my family owned was an IBM PC XT, which was my introduction to the concept of a command line interface being normal. I do wonder what it'll be like for the generation of potential hacker types who won't even remember a world before slick iOS UIs and ubiquitous internet in your pocket. Computers were a kind of source of wonder for me in my childhood, and what I see from young children today is they view them as very mundane, which I suspect hurts their curiosity.

Years detached from those experiences with the XT, I picked up Linux in the late 90s. It was a bit of a learning curve from DOS. But I picked up some very dated book at the local library about Unix and it kind of set me straight.

The real revolution in my thinking came in 2001, when I was unfortunate enough to buy a motherboard with an ALI 1647 chipset (it's sad that I have brain cells devoted to remembering that model number). That chipset, when combined with an NVIDIA video card, would make X crash and lock up after about 30 minutes of use (before you start bashing on Linux, I'd been told the same thing would happen on Windows with this hardware combination). For six months months I was in denial of this problem. I kept thinking the next BIOS update or the next driver would fix the problem. In the meantime I used nothing but console mode, because it was the only thing that was stable.

Six months or so later I sold the old motherboard, paid my quarter to get myself a "real motherboard" (ok, it was more like USD$200), and got X working again. It was good and all to have a GUI again but one thing I did notice was that my command line skills were much improved.

Everyone's assuming the poster means Linux, but he didn't actually specify. Lots of things have command line interfaces. What command line are you actually talking about?