photo by Uwe Aranas
‘Linux’ shows up on many lists of skills that new developers should master. But that little name covers a massive scope of technology orders of magnitude more complex than any programming language or framework. When I hear that a new developer is trying to ‘learn Linux’ it sounds as daunting as a history student saying ‘I’m trying to learn everything about Europe.’
What's something you wish you'd known getting started?
Top comments (13)
Reverse search (ctrl r)
When someone showed me this it was a game changer and sped up things no end - no more endlessly going through this history line by line to find an old command you want to use again and hadn't copied to a scratch notepad!
Technically, that's more a function of the shell you've chosen to use than a true Linuxism. Which is to say, you'll find that functionality on any OS that has a recent-enough version of BASH (possibly other interactive shells, too). ;)
Well as a linux beginner at the time, I was glad I gave it a BASH :D
I use fzf (a command line fuzzy finder) in addition to ctrl+r. Now I can easily search through my history.
See: github.com/junegunn/fzf
I love this
Partial name matching
Say you want to install a .deb file you just downloaded named...
some_really_long_name-v1.99.8764-beta-OMFG-this-name-is-annoyingly-long-and-case-sensitiveAs long as the short version doesn't collide with another file name in the directory you can do.
dpkg -i ./some~Case sensitivity in general was a difficult adjustment until I learned how to use regular expressions, aliases, and exports.
How to exit vi, because it literally took me a year to figure out.
Been using Linux since 1992 (0.98a). Unfortunately, that means that a lot of things that would have fallen into the "wish I'd known before..." category are no longer relevant. Also, I'd made the move to Linux after cutting my teeth on SunOS 4/BSD 4.3, NeXTSTEP, and early, early, early AIX. So, many of the UNIX-y idioscyncasies that tend to trip people up that are new to Linux, I'd already gotten past. =)
To create aliases or functions for common operations. And also, that everything is a file.
Hello,
I would like to know GNU/Linux earlier
.. that it was not as hard as people said
.. that when using commands, you can speed up your work
I would like to had know about i3 earlier too, using it you feel another vision about your tools, (they should not drive you, you should drive them)
It's not actually Linux, it's GNU/Linux...
Linux is the Kernel!
Lol, yeah I thought myself linux that is why it took me so long.
A cheatsheet to use VI editor to program in shell scripts.