I know this is a bit of an odd question but thought I'd try my luck.

I'm completely new to linux and find myself heavily leaning on Gnome for doing everything. By that I mean pointing and clicking instead of learning the various linux commands for use in the terminal. But I find it hard to understand the syntax and all the various different options I need with each command. Is there anyway in which I can learn by example. By that I mean, some kind of log that everytime I maybe move a file around in Gnome or install a rpm or something, that I can see exactly what is being passed to the terminal/kernel. It would just be easier than doing searches for every command and ending up being lazy and just doing it with the mouse. I'm not even sure if this is the way linux even works, but thought I'd post this to see what response I got. Any help what-so-ever would be of great help.

i dont know about showing all your actions, but here are some usefull commands for you

top 'show all running processes sorted by memory, cpu etc
ps -A 'same as above, but simple
ifconfig 'show your network details

most executable files (to run) are kept in
/bin
/usr/bin
/usr/X11R6/bin

need any more advise? just repy and ill help a bit more

I dont think so.

try these...

ls (list files)
ls -l (long list)
mv (move)
rm (remove)
rmdir (remove dir)
rm -rf (forceable remove everything in the path. use with care)
cp (copy)

use the tab key for autocompetion of commands and filenames. USE IT LOTS!!!

that should be enough to get you around the filesystem.

use "man <command>" to get a detailed manual on an installed package or command.

or use --help to get a quick output of command options.
like "cp --help"

change to another user ie root.
su - <username or leave blank for root>

find a program
which "command"

use updatedb and locate to search the filesystem for a text string.
"locate apache"

and you can use grep too to filter the results.
"locate apache |grep /usr/local"

grep is well cool.



uncompress and unpack a tar.gz file
tar zxvf filename.tar.gz

uncompress and unpack a tar.bz2 file
tar jxvf filename.tar.bz2


practice a bit. You'll soon get the hang of it.

Thanks, do you know of somewhere I could get a list of all the commands to use in the terminal. Something I could print out and use as a reference. or is there a command I can type which will give me a complete list?

You could use google for that There are a lot of tutorials on the web you can start with.

If you press <tab> to complete a command, it will complete as much as possible. When you press <tab> again, it will show you every posibility. When you haven't typed anything, it will ask you whether you want to see all 2000 (?) programs in the path But this also includes gnome-programs, and such.

This also works with file names, and shell variables.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lin...e+Search&meta=

Take your pick I seem to remember that one of the mods here has a link to the other of all linux command lists.

maybe you can also find a list or two on the linux documentation project. www.tldp.org

This one looks OK too, http://www.jfroment.uklinux.net/shellcommands.html it's not very complete, but it's organised into operational sections, which I think could be handy

And use "pico" as your text editor "vi" is hard to get to know

fatgod and cadj have the best sugestions, look in
/bin
/usr/bin and
/usr/local/bin
and do a 'man' on the commands
also though, they seemed to miss
/sbin
/usr/sbin
/usr/local/sbin
for superuser utilities, however these /sbin commands must be used as root and shoujld not be taken lightly as they could mess up your system if used incorrectly

oh yeah, and /usr/local/bin