Hey everyone, I'm relatively new to linux and was looking for some advice/direction. I have been using Mint Debian Edition for around 6mo or so, and want to learn to use the command line efficiently and proficiently.

I have set up EndeavourOS on a backup laptop I have and have been playing with it, reading the Arch Wiki and such, but I feel like I'm not necessarily learning why I'm doing things, just doing what has worked for others.

So here I am. I guess I'm looking for recommendations for books or articles (physical or online) that can help me to learn and understand the workings on linux, and especially the command line.

Thank you all so much.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    ·
    3 months ago

    My first recommendation is to become familiar with one flavour of Linux. Debian is a solid choice and it will give you a good understanding of how a great many derivatives operate.

    The command line is a tool to get things done, it's not an end to itself. Some things are easier to do with a GUI, many things are easier to do with the command line interface or CLI.

    Many Linux tools are tiny things that take an input, process it and produce an output. You can string these commands together to achieve things that are complex with a GUI.

    Manipulation of text is a big part of this. Converting things, extracting or filtering data, counting words

    For example, how many times do you use the words "just" and "simply" in the articles you write?

    grep -oiwE "just|simple" *.txt | sort | uniq -c

    That checks all the text files in a directory for the occurrence of either word and shows you how many occurred and what capitalisation they used.

    In other words, learning to use the CLI is about solving problems, one by one, until you don't have to look things up before you understand why or how it works.