It seems to me learning how to use the terminal is a prerequisite to learning how to use Ubuntu. So I'm trying to figure out the best way to learn. Is there a Quizlet online flash card set out there? A better way?
20 Answers
You can add the following line (command) at the end of your ~/.bashrc
file:
echo "Did you know that:"; whatis $(ls /bin | shuf -n 1)
Every time you open the terminal you will learn something about a random command.
If you want some fun, you can use cowsay
"utility". To install it, run this in terminal:
sudo apt-get install cowsay
Then add the following line at the end of your ~/.bashrc
file:
cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1) $(whatis $(ls /bin) 2>/dev/null | shuf -n 1)
Or you can add the above line as alias in ~/.bash_aliases
. I added:
alias ?='cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1) $(whatis $(ls /bin) 2>/dev/null | shuf -n 1)'
Whenever you get bored, you can type in terminal: ?
(followed by Enter). It's like playing dice by yourself.
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2That's extremely cool, but on my distro (Ubuntu 13.04) using the default shell I get
Did you know that: mkdir: nothing appropriate.
every time I start a shell (to be pedantically clear, I don't always seemkdir
but I do always seenothing appropriate
).whatis
works if I put your line of code at the top of~/.bashrc
but not at the end. Not sure what it is that messes it up, but I guess others will run into the same problem.– snim2Aug 26, 2013 at 18:17 -
3@user606723 I chose only
/bin
because over there are the most used commands. But you can useecho "Did you know that:"; whatis $(ls /usr/share/man/man1 | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1)
to choose a random page from all man pages. Aug 26, 2013 at 20:01 -
1
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3@heinrich5991 of course you are correct in general, but if anything in your
/bin
has spaces or newlines in its name then you have bigger problems than bad scripting habits...– evilsoupAug 26, 2013 at 21:40 -
1@snim2 I suspect the problem is be an alias for
ls
that adds-F
or some other flag that affects the output. Changels /bin
to/bin/ls /bin
. Aug 27, 2013 at 14:40
I used to play with whatis
. It's not exactly a game, but it's a relatively easy way to learn.
For example, type whatis sudo apt-get update
and it returns:
Before I execute any command, I hit it with whatis
first. I learn what I'm going to do, then I will do the command with confidence.
If whatis
doesn't provide much information or if it's unclear to me, I will go to and read the man
.
For example, man sudo
.
Google gives you so much info here, sources inside Ask Ubuntu and outside. Here, LMGTFY: best way to learn terminal commands on Ubuntu
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1I'd highly recommend to follow
whatis something
with a thourough read ofman something
BEFORE using the "something" command ^^ . Especially for some (most!) commands, iedd
for example... Man would, for example, also explain the "update" parameter in the example you provide yourself... In your example, whatis shows what is "apt-get" and then tries to find definition of "update" command, which doesn't exist (but could have and be something completely irrelevant) Aug 26, 2013 at 12:50
I do not know of any games, however there are some useful command line utilities that help.
What does a command do?
whatis command
# example:
$ whatis cut
cut (1) - remove sections from each line of files
How do I?
man -k keyword
# example:
$ man -k "remove empty"
rmdir (1) - remove empty directories
Alternatively:
apropos keyword
# defaults to printing every result with at least one of the keywords supplied
# use --and to only print results matching multiple keywords.
$ apropos zip --and extract
funzip (1) - filter for extracting from a ZIP archive in a pipe
unzip (1) - list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive
unzipsfx (1) - self-extracting stub for prepending to ZIP archives
uz (1) - gunzips and extracts a gzip'd tar'd archive
How do I use?
man command
# example:
man tar
# use '?' key to search, and 'q' to quit.
Or, some utilities support a help option, such as:
$ umount --help
Usage: umount -h | -V
umount -a [-d] [-f] [-r] [-n] [-v] [-t vfstypes] [-O opts]
umount [-d] [-f] [-r] [-n] [-v] special | node...
These may be in the form of command -h
, command --help
, command -?
.
For information:
info command
# example:
$ info cat
# shows an information page
If you have something specific you need to accomplish, Google is your friend. Otherwise there are many books, such as the Bash book from O'Rielly.
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1
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3i'd avoid using
<
and>
at all, as persons who need direction to useman
may not know the danger of redirection . For example :command <something> somethingelse
will create asomethingelse
empty file (or truncate an existing one!) in the current dir. It's a bad habit. Just usingman command
is quite self explanatory. Orman __some__command__
or anything safe. Aug 26, 2013 at 13:02 -
hmm, actually it's safe if the
<something
is not an existing file, as otherwise the shell will complain it doesn't exist (apparently does so BEFORE creating the output file)... But still, bad habit Aug 26, 2013 at 13:03 -
1Good point. Just used to writing documentation in that format. (edit) Removed them.– azzAug 26, 2013 at 15:38
Take a look at command line fu
You can browse some cool command line snippets, and if you want deeper understanding you can read the manuals of the commands they use.
Ubuntu was designed to be very user friendly. Learning how to use the terminal is not a prerequisite to learning how to use Ubuntu. It is, however, if you want to become a power user or troubleshoot problems yourself.
To answer your question, I don't know of any games designed to help or teach shell commands, but I would highly recommend the following resources bash and system administration related:
Please note that this tutorial uses Red Hat (another Linux distribution) and references some directories that only apply to students of the University of Surrey.
Hosted at The Linux Documentation Project (http://www.tldp.org/), author Mike G
A wikibook from Wikipedia
http://www.nongnu.org/lpi-manuals/manual/ Study manuals fro the Linux Professional Institute (LPI)
GNU Bash Reference Manual
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (http://linux.die.net/), author Mendel Cooper
You've got tons of games on http://overthewire.org. The easiest is Bandit, "aimed for absolute beginners".
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Excellent link. Seems like there are many wargames in there.
Bandit
seems to be the game for absolute beginners like me.– SundeepNov 20, 2013 at 12:20
There is a game for learning the VIM commands at http://vim-adventures.com/ which I recommend. I get my apprentices to play it on their first day :-)
The Memrise Tool has a unix and linux command line section. It's a great tool for learning anything in a punch card manner.
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That's not exactly what i had in mind but it looks like a great study resource I'll use. Thx! Aug 28, 2013 at 22:15
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There's also the ShellFu course. While Memrise is not a game per se, I still find it very engaging and it does play on your competitive nature.– ThomasHAug 31, 2013 at 18:50
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The Linux Documentation Project is having the best and updating sources for learning BASH.
Ubuntu Community have collected all the good links which are very much helpful to learn BASH
There is the game Uplink. It's been quite fun and threre are pretty good similarities to a linux shell. But it's got its own commands as well.
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1While Uplink is a great game, it's command line is limited to
cd
,dir
,delete
andreboot
. Quite insufficient. I remember there's another hacker game where you actually have to write shell scripts, but I forgot the name. Probably something creative as "hackers" Aug 27, 2013 at 14:04
The best tool I have found for long term memorization and learning is Anki
I use create cards in Anki that require me to type the answer, rather than simply a flash card. It builds the muscle memory. Additionally I perform 15 minutes of training every morning and Anki will sort my cards based on the ones I need to review.
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Sounds like a good tool, but does it also provide the training data for terminal commands? Aug 27, 2013 at 14:11
In the early UNIX days (v6 and v7) (yes before Linux), there was a series of very simplistic tutorials under the command called learn
. I must admit, I started my training there .. it had tutorials on command line, vi, and a little bit of C programming. It has long since disappeared. And of course, this was before the proliferation of books on this subject, the high amount of easy internet connectivity, basically all you had was basically the man
pages.
So now it is quite easy, basically go to Google, either find some documentation posted. Or use amazon to find an appropriate book. Amazon even has ratings and reviews on their books.
Well, most of the basics I learned when Linux was still mostly command-line based and SUSE was one of the few Linux with GUI-based installation. I played around with Gentoo these times...just install your system with some tools like pm-sensors and stuff, soon you're back in the terminal for some configuration
I don't know if there is still a distro that is installed via command-line, as I stopped working with Linux till a month ago, when I found out they finally made the step to getting GUI-based and interesting for Users, great thanks to all programmers out there, that made a lot of my old PCs useful again!!!
Stupid MS simply IS too stupid for maintaining their best product any longer...Windows XP...a company that does that, surely is not considering to get an OS fully stable and safe...and in case of Win 7 they may got it very stable and secure, but it takes way to much resources to do so.
Really love the Linux way off controlling hardware without huge compilers or interpreters or other stuff in the way, like on Windows.
But if you want learn more about Linux, Gentoo is a great way of building up your own system, step by step and also learn how Linux works. Gentoo also is able to run on nearly everything, no matter how small the hardware resources, so you can take a other, older PC for these Linux, install-test, fun times!
Not exactly a game, but there is this site, where you can learn several different commands.
Not a game but take a look at http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/kwc-unix-for-poets.pdf
It covers sed, awk and grep besides others and shows you how to count, sort, compute ngrams etc. It has exercises and all. I've referred to it again and again.
Not a game, but comes handy when you want to learn some command and no linux is available: rextester
The matrix for game cube is where I learned quite(relative to my 13 year old prior knowledge) a bit about the UNIX terminal. There was a mini-game where you'd "hack" your way into the matrix to drop guns off for pickup later when you are playing that level. Actually bar far one of my favorite features of any game ever.
inx (is not X) can be used as live cd and teaches terminal stuff in a fun and interactive way
I guess bandit is one of the best to learn and understand more about Linux commands and knowing more about linux for beginners. You can get the link from here
rm -- '-rf ~/*'
. For a real challenge, try deleting a file whose name consists entirely of unprintable control characters. Bonus points if just printing the name messes up your terminal.