The Command Line Crash Course Controlling Your Computer From The Terminal

&#62; The next warning is stay off IRC or other places where "hackers" hang out. They think it's funny to hand you commands that can destroy your computer. The command rm -rf / is a classic that you must never type. Just avoid them. If you need help, make sure you get it from someone you trust not from random idiots on the internet.<p>I don't really agree with that. I know for sure that popular channels in OFTC and Freenode are monitored by very smart and responsible people that would never let this happen. In my many years on IRC I have not seen a single novice guy looking for help actually get had by someone intentionally trying to mislead/screw over.<p>I would instead encourage novices to read this: <a href="http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#usefora" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#usefora</a> ('<i>How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: Web and IRC forums directed towards newbies often give the quickest response</i>')

File and directory names can contain spaces and require special treatment. This should be addressed up front, before introducing commands with side effects.

I just wrote to Zed:<p>I haven't read past section 0 yet, but I do have a suggestion for people who want to learn how to memorize things faster: use SuperMemo or a modern equivalent, like <a href="http://ankisrs.net/" rel="nofollow">http://ankisrs.net/</a> . Such programs use spaced repetition techniques to improve memory speed. I used Anki for improving my French and recommend it. If you'd like to learn more, see <a href="http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...</a> .<p>Cheers,

I was recently given a small netbook and took the plunge with arch / xmonad and it has been pretty eye opening.. Going from "I need more control over screen brightness", to being able to assign keys that control the display precisely how I want has been frustrating and satisfying in just the right way. Thanks Zed for another great source!

On page 3, about "whoami"<p>&#62; type this command 20 times and say it out loud<p>I have many years of daily command line use behind me and never needed to use this command. I don't like being taken for a child.

I know the OP is not the author, Zed Shaw, but I simply wanted to say Thanks to Zed for this.

pushd / popd where have you been all my life?! How did I not know this? Thanks Zed!

I've been watching this for a little while. With powershell, a lot of the *nix commands have been or can be aliased to the windows commands (e.g. ls and Get-ChildItem). Judging from his notes so far, he isn't taking advantage of this, but hopefully he will.

I got 1 upvote for anyone that can provide me a pdf of this thing.

Zed's productivity is truly inspiring

Am I just a cranky old geek or does anyone else find Zed teaching CLI skills mildly amusing? Or is there truly a large population mentally bound by the graphical interface?<p>Know the basic commands of getting things done isn't just for the experienced admins/developers like myself who have been using keyboards and terminals since the early DOS and VMS days. Ordinary users were able to create documents, check mail and write simple Excel macros, etc. Coworkers shared tips, people had books and kept notes. None of this has ever been rocket science.

I've been waiting for something like this. Thanks a lot Zed!

Once again - another resource with almost no windows support. At least he has a todo. . .<p>Back when I just did PHP and never used a command line having a widows box was painless. Recently I have been learning UNIX at work and Python at home and have been impressed by the lack of resources/support for working with Windows.<p>I suppose I should stop complaining and just blog what I've learned so far . . . though admittedly it isn't much.

I like the tone of the books. It makes things interesting and you feel like stuff is getting done. Just wanted to throw that out there since most of the comments are complaining about it. I don't want you, Zed, to get the perception that everyone is sheepish about it.

Was talking about going Linux soon, and this'll help me work from Terminal exclusively. Thanks!

always considered myself an ace of the command line... heck for some time i even used X only for webbrowser (while cursing) and used TTY1 for vim and TTY2 for a shell where i'd run version control commands and build...<p>but yesterday, installing debian-testing on a new notebook, the radeon cards didn't worked out even with the vesa drivers and i had to use the console for a few hours...<p>i panicked when i realized I had no idea how to bring the wifi up.<p>...and everytime something like this happens (previous one was some punk changing the kernel parameter "single" or "1" or "init 1" to "text")... i feel old and outdated. it hurts.