Terminal. is it completely essential for newbs?

Im a new user. id like to know if not having experience with this is going to lead to a downfall or not? ive set root pass before. but it seems i tend to get around with out manually typing much in it.

Yes -- you need to learn to use the shell to use Linux effectively.

I'd recommend taking a look at the Rute Linux Guide, and then the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide.

Good luck!

--jrtayloriv

Opposite viewpoint: Depending on how you use a computer, you might NEVER need to open a terminal. The flip side is that--once you learn it--it is the fastest and easiest way to do certain things.
The terminal (command-line) is also substantially more powerful in Linux than in Windows.

For most things you do not NEED the terminal, but eventually you will WANT it.

Is it completely essential? No, not for everyday tasks. But is it useful, and should you learn to use it? Absolutely.
I know that when you come over from Windows, things like the terminal scare you. It looks complicated and you've no idea where to start. Furthermore, you've probably (I know I was) been indoctrinated to think that modern operating systems need a full blown gui application for everything.

What you will hopefully learn is that using the shell makes Linux (and unix in general) far more powerful than pure GUI OS's. For instance, I can promise you that it's faster to type 'yum install <package name>' than it is to navigate 5 levels of menus just to install a program.

And hopefully you'll learn to use all the small command line utilities to accomplish some cool things. For example, I was running out of disk space recently, so to save space, I wanted to re-encode my mp3 collection at a lower bitrate. But I obviously only wanted to re-encode those files that were at a high bitrate already, and ignore the ones already at medium quality. With 20000+ mp3 files, I don't know of any gui app that can do that, but with a few lines of shell script (I think it was 5 lines total)controlling lame (a commandline mp3 encoder), it's a breeze.

Depends on whether or not your GUI ever goes balls up ...
I've seen a good number of cases where an update, or a
new NVidia driver rendered the Xserver useless. Knowing
your system, and the use of the tools in that environment
is then essential (unless of course the "windows solution"
is your thing - re-installing the lot).


Cheers,
Tink

Overkill? Rute is okay, but advanced bash scripting?

kevil99, truth is you can get pretty much everything a typical browse-web-check-email-play-music user would want to get done via gui. Knowing the command line helps, especially when it comes to some emergency situation - i.e. (as Tinkster mentioned) graphics card drivers going mad after update.

Hey, open up a terminal and play around with it. Doesn't bite.. and it's.. fun. In a way.

Well another opinion with GUI let say you can do about 80 % of all the thing you like to do.
SO knowing the linux commands is use full ,but do not only learn it by head , try also to understand what the commands mean
I get this advise when start using computer a long time ago and in my opinion it still apply


all the best

If you want to get the most out of Linux, you should learn at least some basic commands, they will help a lot. It took me only about 2-3 hrs a day for 1-2 weeks and I knew most of shell scripting. There are many examples in which it would be very difficult to do a task without the help of shell scripting.

For good guides, check:
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/ (very good guides on awk and sed as well)

Exactly.


Yes, and at some point it probably will. And even if it doesn't, something else will break, and there won't be a fancy GUI tool to diagnose or fix it. Ultimately, you are either going to have to learn it, or have someone else who did learn it walk you through a solution/fix it for you (I'm personally a bigger fan of people who try to do the former, before resorting the the second option...) ... I've never met a person who didn't have a problem in Linux that required them to use a terminal.


No I do not think it's overkill at all. The title is misleading, it is not really an "advanced" guide -- just a solid intro to bash scripting, which makes life much much easier.



--jrtayloriv

The Advanced Bash Scripting guide is a very good learning guide because it is composed almost entirely of well commented examples. Entering in examples and trying them out is the best way to learn. Maybe "Thorough Bash Scripting Guide" would be more characteristic.

The shell is a great tool if you need to perform an operation over a large number of files. Such as search and replace for all the text files in a directory, or replacing whitespace in the names of hundreds of files. Or locating files which certain characteristics, such as all suid programs in the system. To perform similar tasks, a windows user will probably need to locate a shareware program, download it and install it.

After learning enough of the bash (or one of the other Linux shells) you will probably end up installing Cygwin at work because there are some things that are too time consuming to do graphically.

This amount of information and answers is the reason i love LINUX.
THX Guys!!