Knowing the commands
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Well, it's easy... just be born in the early 80s and grow up with home micros!
2 things got me comfortable on command line: 1) A great cheat sheet (one from Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/download/server/thank-you); 2) Practice all the commands from the cheat list regularly. Last page is something for Pro version, but first 2 pages are great for a begginer. There is a typo at a command (or it was in a past cheat sheet): "Sudo change " instead of "sudo chage ". It helped me most to get comfortable with terminal. Enjoy!
if the avg enduser has to temper in a commandline, your program is ass.
Practice.
Doing hackthebox or other CTF challenges, Using CLI software, writing bash scripts.
in my experience, practice, practice, and more practice. but "just git gud m8" isn't really helpful advice. if you don't have half a decade on hand, i can make a few more practical recommendations.
a shell that can do argument autocomplete is your best friend. personally, i use zsh + ohmyzsh + fzf + fzf-tab, but i'm sure there are other configs, and i've heard ohmyzsh is a bit of a nightmare, though i haven't had too many issues.
so let's say you're running the one rsync command this month, and you forgot the args, just tab-tab and you can search through the arguments with fzf.
C:[Enter]
###
I want a dropdown terminal la guake and yuake. Both options don't work on my Fedora. Because of this, I almost never use the terminal.
The need to do it plus the realization that you can script anything based on it.
Drivers. Using recovery mode. Administration. Wanting to describe what to do rather then manually do it. Wild cards are really powerful and so is find and xargs. The text processing commands are useful too.
The other thing is having started computing in the 1970s. Everything was command line back then. GUI systems only become universal in about 1995.
- making it ✨pretty✨
- using it a bunch
- man pages
- arch wiki