command line learning
 

I am new to linux. Have had ubuntu installed as a duel operating system alongside my windows 7 machine for sometime now.

could anyone give me a place to download some manual for beginning users who wish to become aquainted with the command line syntax?

Hi midnight sun,

You might want to check out
From the Linux Documentation Project, Chapter 2
This site has a wealth of information for various distros.

Google can turn up many others.

Hope that helps,
Tim

In a terminal, start off with this command
In another terminal, you can type
where <program> is one from the list in your first terminal. e.g. 'man a2p' will tell you it's an awk to perl translator, and you can probably stop learning about that right there.

There's also some very interesting man pages not about programs. I know of no list, but I'll start one here and maybe people will add to it.

man something.conf - fstab.conf, xorg.conf, anything in the output of
ls /etc/*.conf
man test - bash scripting tests
man regex - Posix regular expressions; I always found these a bit dodgy as not everything interprets them the same.
man perlre - Perl regular expressions

You could also head over to tldp.org for verbose documentation in the style of university reports (boring as hell, not faithful to subject for first 50-90%). They're called HOWTOs. When ignorance begins to bite and you want to do something clever, you may need one of these.Their most enduring effect is that you never want to read another one! :-).

Try here:

http://linuxcommand.org/

You can read it online, download a .pdf, or buy the paperback.

www.linuxquestions.org "Main Menu" (top right screen of this page) click on "Linux Tutorials" or "Book Reviews"

Good luck!

LOLz
I learned UNIX in the late 1980's using LISP for AI Programming.
I Agree, Doc's were boring and the "internet"(ARPANET) was dial-up w/o graphics.
Slow and not that productive unless you knew exactly (URL) what you wanted.

To the OP, Select something and work it through. Even if is boring at first,
it all builds upon the previous lessons. Buckle down with most any reputable
tutorial and test the commands on your own Linux system. That will provide
its own rewards :).

Be sure to feel free to experiment!

Unless it is at work, do not be apprehensive, I have found that more is learned
by failure than by success. Be brave and give it a go!

Oh, And most importantly, Have fun!!

All the best,
Tim

In my years of playing with Linux, I have found some of the best learning (on top of what others are saying) is to just attempt to use Linux for everything.

I'm still not the expert, but whenever you hit a spot that you can't figure something out, hit one of the how to pages, read the man page, and google. Eventually I started liking Linux way better than every thing else. Now it is the only os on my desktop, and with my laptop, dual booting with Windows, I am mostly in Linux.

It takes time to learn command line stuff, just because there are so many command line programs! Each one can have their own syntax and options.

And ctrl+c will normally stop a program from running, if you try the ping command, it will just keep going until you tell it to stop (unless you give it the -c option for a count: ping -c 4 somesite.com will send only 4 pings, then stop).

My next endeavor is to try to learn bash scripting better than just combining a few simple commands. Good luck, and enjoy!

@ midnight sun

Check out youtube as well. They have many tutorials on linux commands and shell scripting. They also have videos dedicated to a specific command you may be interested like awk, sed, ps, and etc.

In any case whether you learn from videos or online content is to practice, practice, practice.

Member Response
 

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!
I like to provide these links to a newbie;
Plus, look at my sig for some very useful links.
Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!
:hattip:

Welcome to LQ, midnight sun!

If you type "info" at the command prompt it should bring you into a help utility which gives you categories to browse into.

Typing 'q' will quit info.
Moving the cursor to lines of information will bring you into subject areas with deeper explanations.
Using page-up/down as well as up arrow will move you around and raise you back up levels

Ultimately if you see commands that you want to know more about, this will help and you can also type 'man <command>', to see just the man page for a given command. You will see the manpage information for commands within info. I mainly use info to find command line commands which I didn't know about that may help me with a certain area.

Thanx everyone. you have all been a great help. I really didnt expect such patient responses, as most sites I have tried
getting information about things...people are so demeaning and short with newbies.

I fixed my first major uh-oh from the command line, when my new kubuntu 14.04 upgrade lost its x session gui desktop...Felt good to actually be able to do something besides reinstalling everything from scratch.

the more I have been playing with things, the more I like the OS

thanks again everyone for the pointers. :)