Not sure if command line stuff is considered programing. In a class at school, where at the command line part. This is where a I got lost on my own trying to learn Linux a few years a go, and the reason I took the class.

I don't get this part at all. I will try to explain what I'm talking about and need help with. Hopefully the Linux Commonty can understand what I need.

In linux there is no reason to do command line. The "man pages" are worthless, they don't mean anything and can not help (of course this is not true if you know what your doing, I'll explain).

I think the problem i'm having is I have no reason to use them. When I fist learned Windows 95, I downloaded a program. I had to go find it. I had a reason to do someing. When I found it, I was able to do what I needed. I started small, now I can go all over the file system and know my way around and do stuff.

In linux, sitting at a command prompt in a termal window, I have nothing to do. The book says stuff like the ls command. I don't need it. The man pages tell you stuff but if I have nothing to do, they don't mean anything.

Does anybody know of excercises I can do to get practice using the command line? I need a reason to do this. does this make sence to you. If youcan help, plesae let me know. Thank you,
Chris

Get a good book on Linux/Unix and practice the commands in it. That's the best way to start. You'll get to know all the important commands and more. That's the way I did it. Then, you can just use Linux as a desktop or for programming as well.

If you don't need it don't use it; I use it for a lot of stuff.
Reading text, editing text, printing text; gathering information,
processing text; running psql for database-queries. If you're
not interested in which files you have, how big they are, when
you last modified one... don't use `ls`. If you don't want to know
how many files of which type are scattered over your file-system
don't use `find` and `file`. If you don't care how many lines of
code there are in a shell-script or C-source, don't use `grep `
and `wc`. If you don't want to produce print-quality output
that would make a lino-type proud of its work, don't consider
TeX.... there's a million things you may not want to do.


Cheers,
Tink

If you're looking for a good tutorial try rute

Create a folder called "MP3", and copy all the files that end with "mp3" to that folder.

mkdir MP3
cp *.mp3 MP3

Think that was easy?
Now make a zipped backup of all the text files in your home, and put the backups in a folder named "TXTBAK".

Next, produce a catalog of your mp3's and produce a PDF catalog of your songs. Or produce a script that enters the ID3 tag information into a database. Or produce a tab separated file cataloging your collection. If you use something like k3b to backup files. Use sed to extract the files backed up and produce a nice looking PDF catalog of each file and the disk that it was backed up to.
Examine the id3 tags in your collection and move any that contain the word podcast into a podcast/ directory. Make it a cron job so it does it every night automatically.

He says the tutorial he has isn't teaching him to do useful things that he can apply right this second. He wants to see more Immediate benefit as he learns.

'ls' by itself isn't a very useful thing when you have nautilus, but 'ls -l jan* feb* mar*' might be a little more useful.

Command line? - the best friend of admin!
Given a slow connection (9600 Baud) to some computer for many km outu there and you must do somthing - stop a program, edit configuration files and start the program. On Linux you can change almost everything including the kernel - everything from command line. Do you think that word build on broadband and quad core Pentiums? - not yet there are much more small, not so much powerfull things in meaning of comfort but they could be responsible about your everyday live! How to learn? - get a good old box from surplus and install reasonably usefull OS Linux on it.

Seven distros (8 counting kubuntu) don't load on my computer. See Linux Distributions, Sub Forum, SuSE/Novell.

Accent on the good old box! - here in Hungary a Dell P3 ~800MHz with 256 Mbyte RAM cost less then 100$ - and it can run windows XP also - no problems ANY distros should work well. I was not read your challenge to instal SuSe (which is counted as the best installable), I would be try Debian switch off frame buffers and acpi but not in BIOS as for kernel (there are several boot options). But I think the best way for a newbie is not fight with strange hardware, but get an oldy and a CPU switch for two PC's with cables - do not need two keyboards and display. After you can use the second for playground to build several servers for HTTP, FTP chat and so on...