Dunno, was just wondering where in the world the link goes.

I've already down loaded the book from the link, I'll just trash it or ask about it when I go to return the book to the college bookstore. I might get the ok from them.

In the meantime I've come up with a good project to start with. Since most of my old hardware is buried in the cellar and it'll take me a few weeks to clear things out and set things up, I'm going to work on the file aspect of linux. I go back a long ways, long enough that I have a ton of old floppy disks for both my old mac and pc. A lot of it is stuff from Compuserve, I was using a program called Tapcis that went online, got a list of threads, then allowed you to pick the threads you wanted to look at. It would then go back online and down load the threads. Pretty handy program in the 12/24 hundred baud dial up modem days when I only had a phone line to work with. Some usenet stuff too. I'm going to get a usb floppy drive and practice sorting out those old files.

Hate to trouble everyone again on this, but I downloaded Bash 4.3 to my pc but it came as a gz file and I don't have a gz opening program. Can anyone recommend one that won't stick in my computer and bug me? I swear it took me forever to get rid of the secondary programs that I got when I down loaded Audacity.

Are you a spam? The way you are acting dont give me the impression you have honest questions for that forum.

What was wrong with it? I simply asked for further advice after running into a problem I didn't expect.

This question can be best answered if you indicated what operating system you are running and probably also what the system specs you have for the PC you are running it on. So please respond indicating whether you are running Linux, Windows, DOS, MAC, or something else. If you're running a PC that is current as of the last year or two, then probably no big deal, but if you're running on something you rebuilt from old hardware, then it's helpful for you to describe the system you're running this on.

Note that if you're not running Linux, but downloading something in a form that is commonly recognized by Linux then this is a likely reason why something like a GZ file is not understood. Also if you happen to not be running Linux, but are downloading emulation tools to run on a different system, but intending to study Linux, then I'd rather recommend that you just install a full version of Linux because most of them will already include BASH.

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I'm running Windows 8.1 on an intel core i5-4460, I bought it last November because I knew I'd be taking computer classes and I'd struggled with the rebuilt computers at times and knew I wouldn't have time to fix them if they went down again. I downloaded bash-4.3.tar.gz because Seyfir recommended the command line as a good place to start and that's what I had gotten used to the class when I logged in and used telnet centos. I didn't want to go too far into Linux and get lost when I was just starting out in it. When I double clicked the file name I was surprised that it didn't automatically decompress and instead told me to go to the app store and use one of the programs there. I'm just seeking advice now on which one to use.

So you can either run a form of Linux as a virtual machine using something like Hyper-V, boot Linux off of something like a USB stick and run it as a live distribution, or you can set up your system to dual boot between Windows 8 and whatever Linux you install. Be aware that likely it has UEFI BIOS and secure boot, which you'll have to deal with in order to get it to boot off of something else besides the installed hard drive.

I don't know if there are updates more adequate for Windows 8, but one can also install cygwin to a Windows system and this provides an emulation space for things like Linux. However if you wish to learn Linux, I feel it's best to run an actual Linux operating system and then do these experimentations.

Something under Windows might detect and unwrap a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file, but probably the contents of that file are Linux programs which won't run under Windows anyways, or even compile if you happen to get source files from that. So no real benefit if you happen to unzip what you have, it probably won't run on your system as is.

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Got it, thanks.