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How to Learn Unix Tools

169 points by nindalf 6y ago

sgt 6y ago
It's almost bizarre how cmatrix takes up 100% CPU on my computer. I suspect it will be more efficient in xterm rather than Terminal.app though.
- nindalf 6y ago
  100% CPU is a small price to pay to look like a hacker. :)
- enriquto 6y ago
  > I suspect it will be more efficient in xterm rather than Terminal.app though. Indeed. I get 3% CPU usage on my xterm, 5% when in full screen. Still too much for a barely 6 year-old laptop, but nothing to worry about. EDIT: if you add the "-a" option (asyncronous scroll), CPU usage falls below 1%. I wonder what Terminal.app does to be so outrageously inefficient.
  - sgt 6y ago
    I think it's a combination of a larger window, antialiased text, arguably better font, semi transparent background, terminal being 256-color (or more), and so on. By passing -a I get it down to 80% CPU. This is progress, guys!
    - enriquto 6y ago
      It can't be that. I have all of this except the transparent background. But that should be a compositor thing, independent of the window contents. That's bizarre, pushing a few thousand characters to the screen shouldn't, by far, reach 80% CPU usage. There's something in your system that's really botched up.
      - sgt 6y ago
        I tested again, it's Terminal.app doing something! I tried with iTerm and CPU usage is negligible. Wonder what it is doing. My system is otherwise very fast.
enriquto 6y ago
Still, after almost 40 years, Kernighan and Pike's book is a great reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme... It may be a bit dated in some inconsequential details, but it is an extremely refreshing and fun read.
- bear8642 6y ago
  the yacc and lex tutorial to build hoc is also excellent
jonsen 6y ago
“Trial and error is the way to go.” I hate it. And that’s why I never made it far into unix land.
- hulitu 6y ago
  Unix has a manual, you know.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > “Trial and error is the way to go.” I hate it. Errr... isn't all of science is based on trial and error?
wodenokoto 6y ago
In terms of getting started with the command line and getting an understanding of what you are doing (rather than a handful of “memories these commands” as some beginner tutorials sadly end up being) I’ve found “Learn enough command line to be dangerous” to be absolutely amazing. It’s free, even though the webpage makes it look you might need to buy a subscription (edit: you need to pay beyond chapter 2). It takes half a day to a whole workday to work through, but for me it was a great investment of time. https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial
- drowntoge 6y ago
  The tutorial looks neat. It asks me to start a $5 subscription to get past Chapter 2 though.
  - rovr138 6y ago
    At the bottom it says continue reading and it took me to chapter 2 and from there to 3, https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial/manipulating_files https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial/manipulati...
    - trymas 6y ago
      Chapter 3 is locked - at least for me. Though 3$ is probably a small price to pay for standalone version.
  - wodenokoto 6y ago
    My bad. It used to be free and I just clicked through to the second chapter and that convinced me it was still the case.
  - nateweiss 6y ago
    Looks like they also offer the book for $3 “la la carte” (without a subscription) which sounds reasonable.
conjectures 6y ago
`tldr` program seems useful to know about, thanks.
- bennyp101 6y ago
  Yep, I've just installed it - looks like it will be perfect for when I have to do things that I rarely do (and just want to quickly know how to do something)
- jackdawed 6y ago
  You might be interested in the Rust implementation dbrgn/tealdeer. There is also denisdoro/navi which can use both cheat.sh and tldr, and you can also write your own cheatsheets.
hivacruz 6y ago
man is missing some concrete examples about how the tool could be used. tldr seems a good thing to fix that. cheat.sh is also a great alternative to tldr, I use it a lot.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  I regularly google man {x} : man grep, man curl... and a couple of times a year I absentmindedly google : man find. there's no linux in the first 30 pages of results
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    DDG bang searches: manpage !manpage Debian Manpages !debman manpages. org !mnp MirBSD Manpages !mbsdman Ubuntu Manpage !uman
abhayhegde 6y ago
I did not know about `cmatrix`. Looks so cool. I wonder why does its CPU usage shoots beyond 40% though.
- dspillett 6y ago
  Is it choosing the CPU resource, or is it your terminal app doing so to make many individual changes per frame? Many terminal emulators are far from efficient in that sort of use case as they simply aren't optimised at all for it as it is relatively rare. It could be a mix of both, of course.
samuel 6y ago
The best way is being restricted to dumb terminals for compiling and running university assigments. I don't know how younger people force themselves to learn to use the command line. I had a windows 98 at home at the time and the university enviroment seemed primitive in comparison, but I had no choice. And were lucky, we had X-terminals!
- koolba 6y ago
  For even faster learning make sure the remote machine is far enough away that network lag is a factor. It’s amazing how fast the student will learn I/O redirection, tailing files, and grepping for needles, and of course automating the entire build / test lifecycle.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    I first learned not only the Unix CLI but Vim under these conditions. I typed the HTML for my student website by hand in a minimal and ancient Vim build, because student websites were hosted on some kind of Unix mainframe. It probably took me 2 hours to write 5 sentences! I was so proud of myself that I added a footer to the effect of: > This page was typed painstakingly in Vim. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I'm sure I would have eventually forced myself to learn Vim anyway if I never had access to this Unix system, but it was definitely important and formative to start off this way.
    - gpvos 6y ago
      When I was at uni and I logged in from home with my 1200 baud modem, I used vi's "open mode" (no, vim doesn't have it), which is visual mode, but restricted to one line at a time. I even had a shell alias for "ex +o $*" to start it. It was quite fun to use, but nowadays it's not terribly useful anymore, so I can see why vim hasn't implemented it.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    And compression
  - 6y ago
petr25102018 6y ago
I have recently published an ebook about the introduction to the Linux command line, for anyone interested: https://gumroad.com/l/moderncommandline https://gumroad.com/l/moderncommandline
throwaway823882 6y ago
> I've never read a man page from start to finish, and I'm not sure you're meant to. When I was 16 and just starting to get into Linux, I got a tiny little paperback, "reference to Unix programs" or something. It was literally just a list of every single Unix program and a shortened version of its man page. I read it cover to cover. After that, if I needed to do something on the command line, I knew there was a program to do it and what its capabilities were. After a couple weeks I didn't need the reference anymore. I can't remember the book anymore, but this is basically what it was like: https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf See if you can find a version newer than 1973, though... O'Reilly's Unix In A Nutshell isn't bad. Read your man pages cover to cover. It's for the same exact reason you learn a bunch of "useless BS" in school: to save you time down the road because you'll know where to go for the solution.
mmcgaha 6y ago
For users, The UNIX Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike is the book that got me going. There are a few things in there that don't exist now but it is the most concise easy-to-read book for new *nix users. For administration the UNIX System Administration Handbook by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, and Hein is how I got started. Newer editions of this book cover Linux specifically.
- Tsiklon 6y ago
  The UNIX System Administration Handbook was the bible when I got started out. A tremendous book with a sizable legacy.
ephaeton 6y ago
how I learned UNIX tools: (on a NetBSD,) alphabetically went through /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/games and read each of the program's man pages. Yeah, took a while. Also read POSIX.2 The things you do with your free time ...
- scbrg 6y ago
  Sucks to not learn about zsh until the very end though ;)
  - ephaeton 6y ago
    Haha! I understand the sentiment :) But it was ok, NetBSD doesn't have zsh installed by default (and neither bash, only csh, sh and (pd? m?)ksh). When I did that, I was primed to use tcsh at $WORK. Switched to ksh later (and remained on there for a loooong time). Anyways. I failed to make an actual point. My point was the following: The BSD manpages are _excellent_. IMO way better than the linux/GNU manpages (or info pages) of comparable utilities. It shows, again IMO, that the BSDs are a complete, single-tree distribution where documentation, userland and kernel go hand in hand and are equally well groomed. So maybe, for learning "UNIX", go get yourself a nice little {Net,Free,Open}BSD install and toy around with the elder ways.
    - scbrg 6y ago
      FWIW it was just a silly joke. I was going to write xargs first, but then realized that there's a couple of letters after x. I'm not even a zsh user myself. I honestly agree that reading through the man-pages a good idea (after you've acquired some basic knowledge already of course), and as a Linux user I'm a bit envious of many things BSD, the documentation included.
jonseager 6y ago
This post definitely contains some good general advice, to me the most important step is really simple: Just use them. And keep on using them. Resources like those suggested are good, but each will suit people differently - the one thing that all people who are expert at these tools have in common is that they've all used them a lot!
- jonseager 6y ago
  And, to be fair, give yourself a safe enough space to experiment. Use Docker, libvirt, Digital Ocean, multipass, Virtualbox, or whatever you want, but find a place where you can use the stuff without worrying too much about the consequences :)
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  > Just use them. And keep on using them. The last bit is very crucial. Be prepared to relearn it after a prolonged break. So taking notes may be of some practical help. I wish *NIX land had some uniform convention for options naming and a targeted help system to go with it, so one could lookup an option directly (preferrably in shortened form, no need to spell out the whole word). OpenVMS HELP was a good example of user-friendly command-line help system, well, but that's another story...
mraza007 6y ago
Honestly I have forced my self to use a terminal and now I can’t even go without using it. I have made my workflow very minimal such as I use firefox for browsing and terminal for pretty much everything
- blumomo 6y ago
  Try Qutebrowser [0] instead of Firefox as it has a terminal-like command line interface (while staying graphical), no mouse required. [0] https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/
  - mraza007 6y ago
    I think I have tried it. The only reason I don’t use it too much because uses a lot of ram and plus its made with python which makes it slow compared to other browser Maybe it’s just my opinion but happy to hear your thoughts on this. I use vim extension on firefox btw
    - blumomo 6y ago
      Personally I use Qutebrowser on the same screen next to my terminal when I code. That allows me to be mouse-free during coding. It’s a great experience. Not seeing it being slow, I feel that the Python-hackability gives me superpowers. Can’t judge the RAM consumption, my machine has sufficient RAM (40GB). For private use (banking, email) I still use Firefox though.
      - mraza007 6y ago
        Wow you have 5 times more ram than mine. Anyways I have used qutebrowser it makes things slow especially when I’m watching something on YouTube this is why I sticked to firefox
soheilpro 6y ago
Shameless plug: mann helps your remember command line args. https://github.com/soheilpro/mann https://github.com/soheilpro/mann
- narwally 6y ago
  This is awesome and so simple that I can't believe I haven't done it for myself already. It would be really useful to have your personal mann page displayed as the header or footer of the official man page.
hnlmorg 6y ago
> Most of these tools come with a --help or -h switch, that tells you the options available, with a short explanation of what each does. Please don't do this by default unless you're sure such a command supports that flag otherwise you're literally just running unknown commands with unknown consequences. The first port of call should always be `man` and not `--help` like the article suggests. Aside from that, the article looks good.
- pfarrell 6y ago
  For example, the Postgres interactive client, psql: -?, —-help -> help info -h -> set the host you are connecting
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  If `--help` does anything besides display usage info or fail, the author of the tool is to blame. Many applications that are installed outside the scope of a package manager, especially tools distributed as a single binary, lack a manpage.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    This is my reasoning. There are almost no man pages at my job and the software is very old so good luck Googling. I practically default to --help here. I figure if --help somehow screws something up then they deserve it.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    > If `--help` does anything besides display usage info or fail, the author of the tool is to blame. No they're not. Not every command line tool uses flags, some use ordered parameters. So parameter 1 might be a file name to write to rather than a flag. Just look at how messy it is working with tools like `cp` and the `--` flag to get an idea of the problems some programs face differentiating between files and flags. Other tools might not take any command line parameters at all. So it's entirely forgiveable for them not to check if any parameters were supplied. Then there is the issue that some programs accept `-h` and others `-?` as a shorthand. Some programs have `-h` as short for `--host`. Plus even if I were to agree with your point, which I don't, it's entirely moot because it's not the author of the tool that is the one who has to fix any issues that might happen to a host system due to someone blindly running commands. So whichever way you cut it, blindly throwing flags at executables and expecting a favourable outcome every time can be risky. > Many applications that are installed outside the scope of a package manager, especially tools distributed as a single binary, lack a manpage. That point wasn't forgotten by me. But if you've downloaded an application outside the scope of the package manager then you should at least have some idea how it functions and thus know whether it's safe to run `--help`. If not, you probably know where to look online to find that information out. Like I said in my OP, I've got nothing against people using `--help` et al. I use them myself. But it shouldn't be the first thing you recommend UNIX newbies to do when they're figuring out a command. It's usually something you do when you're already familiar with what a command does but need a nudge as to what flags you need to supply.
crazypython 6y ago
I use tldr-pages: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
- jasonladuke0311 6y ago
  I like tldr, but I find about half of the time it doesn't cover the use case I am looking for. I do find it useful for remembering arg order and such.
- yiyus 6y ago
  Plan 9 man pages are also much more manageable than their respective GNU versions. The tools in Plan 9 are also much simpler, with fewer options (and also a few differences), but it's a very useful subset, you will rarely need anything else.
jll29 6y ago
1. read the manual pages in book form. 2. play a man page quiz with a friend: - read a random command and ask for the description - read a random description and ask which command it is for. I've done both as an undergraduate. The HP-UX manual set remain on the shelves right next to me. Over the years, I found letting candidates compose a pipeline of commands to solve a problem is a great way to make interviews more fun ("How would you solve this problem without writing a program, by combining existing ones?").
- rodiger 6y ago
  That's useful, but as someone with an unreliable memory having to recall specific commands under pressure doesn't sound too fun :)
  - Tsiklon 6y ago
    I don't think absolute precision regarding specific commands or flags therein would be required because when you're in the chair and dealing with a problem you're going to have access to the resources you need to get that precision (man pages, vendor documentation etc). Though being able to explain the mental model of how you want to go about manipulating the output, extraction of the information or data you need, be it through json manipulation, regex, line/column parsing etc is valuable.
  - narwally 6y ago
    Exactly, the man pages are there so I don't have to remember every command perfectly.
- Raineer 6y ago
  I did the "man pages in book form" when studying for my LPIC. Also flashcards. Both approaches worked excellently :)
kerblang 6y ago
I often look at web versions of man pages because it's just plain easier to deal with when researching mega-commands like curl or openssl. The green-screen-text-only bastard in me argues vehemently against this, but the pragmatist in me doesn't care. It's just plain easier.
- enriquto 6y ago
  How so? You can navigate much more easily inside the less pager that displays manpages than inside a browser. Moreover, it is easier to copy/paste (or simply read) snippets of the manpage into your terminal, after all everything happens in the same window. Opening a web browser and finding the man page also seems much more cumbersome than typing "man". I would never have thought that it would seem easier to anybody!
Raineer 6y ago
I never knew about tldr. That tip alone is phenomenal. I'm embarrassed to say I've been doing this 20 years and never seen it. Trying to pull out several common usage examples from man pages has always been my difficulty.
- alex_smart 6y ago
  Try this: man man | awk '/^[A-Z]+/ { begin = 0 } /^EXAMPLES|^NAME/ { begin = 1 } (begin == 1) { print }'
yiyus 6y ago
There are irc channels that can also be of help. I used to spend my time in #sed and #awk, and try to answer any short question that came up in the channel. They came up at a good pace, I don't know if this is still the case. It was a really good exercise, and it has an additional social aspect you will not get from reading books (which is a great resource too).
alex_smart 6y ago
Wow, no love for info?
- chousuke 6y ago
  What does info add over plain old manual pages? I honestly don't really know, since I usually forget that info even exists. I feel like the effort the GNU project put into creating a competing standard for documentation would have been better spent improving the tooling around the standard man page mechanisms instead.
  - alex_smart 6y ago
    >What does info add over plain old manual pages? I feel like info pages are more suitable for explaining the features of larger pieces of software. Can you imagine what a mess the man page for emacs would be, if it were to try to explain all its functionality? Instead the man page of emacs only gives a brief description of the software and explains the command line options and all the functionality is explained in an info document. I think of info as an alternative to /usr/share/doc, not man pages. The most import features of info that are missing from man: 1. pagination 2. cross-referencing 3. structure
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    There is some truly great info-based documentation. The GNU AWK User Guide comes to mind: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html There's alot of information in there that is not in the manpage. (I'm painfully aware of this as I tend to rely mostly on the manpage, and learn things every time (which is rare) I read the GNU docs.) At the same time, the info interface and navigation remain completely opaque and nonintuitive to me.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  The genius of man is that it uses any standard system pager, and so the navigation semantics (admittedly simple) are clear. Info uses a dedicated document viewer, which, unless you use that frequently is novel and ideosycratic when used. (This can be changed, but more painfully than with man.) Info is a hypertext documentation system admittedly. It happens to have been invented pretty much simultaneously with another you may have heard of, the World Wide Web. A system with slightly greater user familiarity. And Free Software implementations. Debian's 'dwww' is an interesting marriage of multiple docuentation formats. It presents manpages, info pages, Debian package information, and additional documentation, all categorised and indexed, and accessible through a web browser from your local system. Including, as it happens, console mode browsers (lynx, w3m, elinks, links2, etc.). Which tends to amp up and standardise access to all of the above. dwww is the one thing which makes info actually useful. Which is a shame as there really is some quite good info documentation, it's just buried under what is for most people, an impenetrable interface.

169 points by nindalf 6y ago

sgt 6y ago

It's almost bizarre how cmatrix takes up 100% CPU on my computer. I suspect it will be more efficient in xterm rather than Terminal.app though.

nindalf 6y ago
100% CPU is a small price to pay to look like a hacker. :)
enriquto 6y ago
> I suspect it will be more efficient in xterm rather than Terminal.app though. Indeed. I get 3% CPU usage on my xterm, 5% when in full screen. Still too much for a barely 6 year-old laptop, but nothing to worry about. EDIT: if you add the "-a" option (asyncronous scroll), CPU usage falls below 1%. I wonder what Terminal.app does to be so outrageously inefficient.
- sgt 6y ago
  I think it's a combination of a larger window, antialiased text, arguably better font, semi transparent background, terminal being 256-color (or more), and so on. By passing -a I get it down to 80% CPU. This is progress, guys!
  - enriquto 6y ago
    It can't be that. I have all of this except the transparent background. But that should be a compositor thing, independent of the window contents. That's bizarre, pushing a few thousand characters to the screen shouldn't, by far, reach 80% CPU usage. There's something in your system that's really botched up.
    - sgt 6y ago
      I tested again, it's Terminal.app doing something! I tried with iTerm and CPU usage is negligible. Wonder what it is doing. My system is otherwise very fast.

enriquto 6y ago

Still, after almost 40 years, Kernighan and Pike's book is a great reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme... It may be a bit dated in some inconsequential details, but it is an extremely refreshing and fun read.

bear8642 6y ago
the yacc and lex tutorial to build hoc is also excellent

jonsen 6y ago

“Trial and error is the way to go.” I hate it. And that’s why I never made it far into unix land.

hulitu 6y ago
Unix has a manual, you know.
enriquto 6y ago
> “Trial and error is the way to go.” I hate it. Errr... isn't all of science is based on trial and error?

wodenokoto 6y ago

In terms of getting started with the command line and getting an understanding of what you are doing (rather than a handful of “memories these commands” as some beginner tutorials sadly end up being) I’ve found “Learn enough command line to be dangerous” to be absolutely amazing. It’s free, even though the webpage makes it look you might need to buy a subscription (edit: you need to pay beyond chapter 2). It takes half a day to a whole workday to work through, but for me it was a great investment of time. https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial

drowntoge 6y ago
The tutorial looks neat. It asks me to start a $5 subscription to get past Chapter 2 though.
- rovr138 6y ago
  At the bottom it says continue reading and it took me to chapter 2 and from there to 3, https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial/manipulating_files https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial/manipulati...
  - trymas 6y ago
    Chapter 3 is locked - at least for me. Though 3$ is probably a small price to pay for standalone version.
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  My bad. It used to be free and I just clicked through to the second chapter and that convinced me it was still the case.
- nateweiss 6y ago
  Looks like they also offer the book for $3 “la la carte” (without a subscription) which sounds reasonable.

conjectures 6y ago

`tldr` program seems useful to know about, thanks.

bennyp101 6y ago
Yep, I've just installed it - looks like it will be perfect for when I have to do things that I rarely do (and just want to quickly know how to do something)
jackdawed 6y ago
You might be interested in the Rust implementation dbrgn/tealdeer. There is also denisdoro/navi which can use both cheat.sh and tldr, and you can also write your own cheatsheets.

hivacruz 6y ago

man is missing some concrete examples about how the tool could be used. tldr seems a good thing to fix that. cheat.sh is also a great alternative to tldr, I use it a lot.

monkeycantype 6y ago
I regularly google man {x} : man grep, man curl... and a couple of times a year I absentmindedly google : man find. there's no linux in the first 30 pages of results
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  DDG bang searches: manpage !manpage Debian Manpages !debman manpages. org !mnp MirBSD Manpages !mbsdman Ubuntu Manpage !uman

abhayhegde 6y ago

I did not know about `cmatrix`. Looks so cool. I wonder why does its CPU usage shoots beyond 40% though.

dspillett 6y ago
Is it choosing the CPU resource, or is it your terminal app doing so to make many individual changes per frame? Many terminal emulators are far from efficient in that sort of use case as they simply aren't optimised at all for it as it is relatively rare. It could be a mix of both, of course.

samuel 6y ago

The best way is being restricted to dumb terminals for compiling and running university assigments. I don't know how younger people force themselves to learn to use the command line. I had a windows 98 at home at the time and the university enviroment seemed primitive in comparison, but I had no choice. And were lucky, we had X-terminals!

koolba 6y ago
For even faster learning make sure the remote machine is far enough away that network lag is a factor. It’s amazing how fast the student will learn I/O redirection, tailing files, and grepping for needles, and of course automating the entire build / test lifecycle.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I first learned not only the Unix CLI but Vim under these conditions. I typed the HTML for my student website by hand in a minimal and ancient Vim build, because student websites were hosted on some kind of Unix mainframe. It probably took me 2 hours to write 5 sentences! I was so proud of myself that I added a footer to the effect of: > This page was typed painstakingly in Vim. "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I'm sure I would have eventually forced myself to learn Vim anyway if I never had access to this Unix system, but it was definitely important and formative to start off this way.
  - gpvos 6y ago
    When I was at uni and I logged in from home with my 1200 baud modem, I used vi's "open mode" (no, vim doesn't have it), which is visual mode, but restricted to one line at a time. I even had a shell alias for "ex +o $*" to start it. It was quite fun to use, but nowadays it's not terribly useful anymore, so I can see why vim hasn't implemented it.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  And compression
- 6y ago

petr25102018 6y ago

I have recently published an ebook about the introduction to the Linux command line, for anyone interested: https://gumroad.com/l/moderncommandline https://gumroad.com/l/moderncommandline

throwaway823882 6y ago

> I've never read a man page from start to finish, and I'm not sure you're meant to. When I was 16 and just starting to get into Linux, I got a tiny little paperback, "reference to Unix programs" or something. It was literally just a list of every single Unix program and a shortened version of its man page. I read it cover to cover. After that, if I needed to do something on the command line, I knew there was a program to do it and what its capabilities were. After a couple weeks I didn't need the reference anymore. I can't remember the book anymore, but this is basically what it was like: https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf See if you can find a version newer than 1973, though... O'Reilly's Unix In A Nutshell isn't bad. Read your man pages cover to cover. It's for the same exact reason you learn a bunch of "useless BS" in school: to save you time down the road because you'll know where to go for the solution.

mmcgaha 6y ago

For users, The UNIX Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike is the book that got me going. There are a few things in there that don't exist now but it is the most concise easy-to-read book for new *nix users. For administration the UNIX System Administration Handbook by Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, and Hein is how I got started. Newer editions of this book cover Linux specifically.

Tsiklon 6y ago
The UNIX System Administration Handbook was the bible when I got started out. A tremendous book with a sizable legacy.

ephaeton 6y ago

how I learned UNIX tools: (on a NetBSD,) alphabetically went through /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/games and read each of the program's man pages. Yeah, took a while. Also read POSIX.2 The things you do with your free time ...

scbrg 6y ago
Sucks to not learn about zsh until the very end though ;)
- ephaeton 6y ago
  Haha! I understand the sentiment :) But it was ok, NetBSD doesn't have zsh installed by default (and neither bash, only csh, sh and (pd? m?)ksh). When I did that, I was primed to use tcsh at $WORK. Switched to ksh later (and remained on there for a loooong time). Anyways. I failed to make an actual point. My point was the following: The BSD manpages are _excellent_. IMO way better than the linux/GNU manpages (or info pages) of comparable utilities. It shows, again IMO, that the BSDs are a complete, single-tree distribution where documentation, userland and kernel go hand in hand and are equally well groomed. So maybe, for learning "UNIX", go get yourself a nice little {Net,Free,Open}BSD install and toy around with the elder ways.
  - scbrg 6y ago
    FWIW it was just a silly joke. I was going to write xargs first, but then realized that there's a couple of letters after x. I'm not even a zsh user myself. I honestly agree that reading through the man-pages a good idea (after you've acquired some basic knowledge already of course), and as a Linux user I'm a bit envious of many things BSD, the documentation included.

jonseager 6y ago

This post definitely contains some good general advice, to me the most important step is really simple: Just use them. And keep on using them. Resources like those suggested are good, but each will suit people differently - the one thing that all people who are expert at these tools have in common is that they've all used them a lot!

jonseager 6y ago
And, to be fair, give yourself a safe enough space to experiment. Use Docker, libvirt, Digital Ocean, multipass, Virtualbox, or whatever you want, but find a place where you can use the stuff without worrying too much about the consequences :)
zoomablemind 6y ago
> Just use them. And keep on using them. The last bit is very crucial. Be prepared to relearn it after a prolonged break. So taking notes may be of some practical help. I wish *NIX land had some uniform convention for options naming and a targeted help system to go with it, so one could lookup an option directly (preferrably in shortened form, no need to spell out the whole word). OpenVMS HELP was a good example of user-friendly command-line help system, well, but that's another story...

mraza007 6y ago

Honestly I have forced my self to use a terminal and now I can’t even go without using it. I have made my workflow very minimal such as I use firefox for browsing and terminal for pretty much everything

blumomo 6y ago
Try Qutebrowser [0] instead of Firefox as it has a terminal-like command line interface (while staying graphical), no mouse required. [0] https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/
- mraza007 6y ago
  I think I have tried it. The only reason I don’t use it too much because uses a lot of ram and plus its made with python which makes it slow compared to other browser Maybe it’s just my opinion but happy to hear your thoughts on this. I use vim extension on firefox btw
  - blumomo 6y ago
    Personally I use Qutebrowser on the same screen next to my terminal when I code. That allows me to be mouse-free during coding. It’s a great experience. Not seeing it being slow, I feel that the Python-hackability gives me superpowers. Can’t judge the RAM consumption, my machine has sufficient RAM (40GB). For private use (banking, email) I still use Firefox though.
    - mraza007 6y ago
      Wow you have 5 times more ram than mine. Anyways I have used qutebrowser it makes things slow especially when I’m watching something on YouTube this is why I sticked to firefox

soheilpro 6y ago

Shameless plug: mann helps your remember command line args. https://github.com/soheilpro/mann https://github.com/soheilpro/mann

narwally 6y ago
This is awesome and so simple that I can't believe I haven't done it for myself already. It would be really useful to have your personal mann page displayed as the header or footer of the official man page.

hnlmorg 6y ago

> Most of these tools come with a --help or -h switch, that tells you the options available, with a short explanation of what each does. Please don't do this by default unless you're sure such a command supports that flag otherwise you're literally just running unknown commands with unknown consequences. The first port of call should always be `man` and not `--help` like the article suggests. Aside from that, the article looks good.

pfarrell 6y ago
For example, the Postgres interactive client, psql: -?, —-help -> help info -h -> set the host you are connecting
thinkmassive 6y ago
If `--help` does anything besides display usage info or fail, the author of the tool is to blame. Many applications that are installed outside the scope of a package manager, especially tools distributed as a single binary, lack a manpage.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  This is my reasoning. There are almost no man pages at my job and the software is very old so good luck Googling. I practically default to --help here. I figure if --help somehow screws something up then they deserve it.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  > If `--help` does anything besides display usage info or fail, the author of the tool is to blame. No they're not. Not every command line tool uses flags, some use ordered parameters. So parameter 1 might be a file name to write to rather than a flag. Just look at how messy it is working with tools like `cp` and the `--` flag to get an idea of the problems some programs face differentiating between files and flags. Other tools might not take any command line parameters at all. So it's entirely forgiveable for them not to check if any parameters were supplied. Then there is the issue that some programs accept `-h` and others `-?` as a shorthand. Some programs have `-h` as short for `--host`. Plus even if I were to agree with your point, which I don't, it's entirely moot because it's not the author of the tool that is the one who has to fix any issues that might happen to a host system due to someone blindly running commands. So whichever way you cut it, blindly throwing flags at executables and expecting a favourable outcome every time can be risky. > Many applications that are installed outside the scope of a package manager, especially tools distributed as a single binary, lack a manpage. That point wasn't forgotten by me. But if you've downloaded an application outside the scope of the package manager then you should at least have some idea how it functions and thus know whether it's safe to run `--help`. If not, you probably know where to look online to find that information out. Like I said in my OP, I've got nothing against people using `--help` et al. I use them myself. But it shouldn't be the first thing you recommend UNIX newbies to do when they're figuring out a command. It's usually something you do when you're already familiar with what a command does but need a nudge as to what flags you need to supply.

crazypython 6y ago

I use tldr-pages: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

jasonladuke0311 6y ago
I like tldr, but I find about half of the time it doesn't cover the use case I am looking for. I do find it useful for remembering arg order and such.
yiyus 6y ago
Plan 9 man pages are also much more manageable than their respective GNU versions. The tools in Plan 9 are also much simpler, with fewer options (and also a few differences), but it's a very useful subset, you will rarely need anything else.

jll29 6y ago

1. read the manual pages in book form. 2. play a man page quiz with a friend: - read a random command and ask for the description - read a random description and ask which command it is for. I've done both as an undergraduate. The HP-UX manual set remain on the shelves right next to me. Over the years, I found letting candidates compose a pipeline of commands to solve a problem is a great way to make interviews more fun ("How would you solve this problem without writing a program, by combining existing ones?").

rodiger 6y ago
That's useful, but as someone with an unreliable memory having to recall specific commands under pressure doesn't sound too fun :)
- Tsiklon 6y ago
  I don't think absolute precision regarding specific commands or flags therein would be required because when you're in the chair and dealing with a problem you're going to have access to the resources you need to get that precision (man pages, vendor documentation etc). Though being able to explain the mental model of how you want to go about manipulating the output, extraction of the information or data you need, be it through json manipulation, regex, line/column parsing etc is valuable.
- narwally 6y ago
  Exactly, the man pages are there so I don't have to remember every command perfectly.
Raineer 6y ago
I did the "man pages in book form" when studying for my LPIC. Also flashcards. Both approaches worked excellently :)

kerblang 6y ago

I often look at web versions of man pages because it's just plain easier to deal with when researching mega-commands like curl or openssl. The green-screen-text-only bastard in me argues vehemently against this, but the pragmatist in me doesn't care. It's just plain easier.

enriquto 6y ago
How so? You can navigate much more easily inside the less pager that displays manpages than inside a browser. Moreover, it is easier to copy/paste (or simply read) snippets of the manpage into your terminal, after all everything happens in the same window. Opening a web browser and finding the man page also seems much more cumbersome than typing "man". I would never have thought that it would seem easier to anybody!

Raineer 6y ago

I never knew about tldr. That tip alone is phenomenal. I'm embarrassed to say I've been doing this 20 years and never seen it. Trying to pull out several common usage examples from man pages has always been my difficulty.

alex_smart 6y ago
Try this: man man | awk '/^[A-Z]+/ { begin = 0 } /^EXAMPLES|^NAME/ { begin = 1 } (begin == 1) { print }'

yiyus 6y ago

There are irc channels that can also be of help. I used to spend my time in #sed and #awk, and try to answer any short question that came up in the channel. They came up at a good pace, I don't know if this is still the case. It was a really good exercise, and it has an additional social aspect you will not get from reading books (which is a great resource too).

alex_smart 6y ago

Wow, no love for info?

chousuke 6y ago
What does info add over plain old manual pages? I honestly don't really know, since I usually forget that info even exists. I feel like the effort the GNU project put into creating a competing standard for documentation would have been better spent improving the tooling around the standard man page mechanisms instead.
- alex_smart 6y ago
  >What does info add over plain old manual pages? I feel like info pages are more suitable for explaining the features of larger pieces of software. Can you imagine what a mess the man page for emacs would be, if it were to try to explain all its functionality? Instead the man page of emacs only gives a brief description of the software and explains the command line options and all the functionality is explained in an info document. I think of info as an alternative to /usr/share/doc, not man pages. The most import features of info that are missing from man: 1. pagination 2. cross-referencing 3. structure
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  There is some truly great info-based documentation. The GNU AWK User Guide comes to mind: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html There's alot of information in there that is not in the manpage. (I'm painfully aware of this as I tend to rely mostly on the manpage, and learn things every time (which is rare) I read the GNU docs.) At the same time, the info interface and navigation remain completely opaque and nonintuitive to me.
dredmorbius 6y ago
The genius of man is that it uses any standard system pager, and so the navigation semantics (admittedly simple) are clear. Info uses a dedicated document viewer, which, unless you use that frequently is novel and ideosycratic when used. (This can be changed, but more painfully than with man.) Info is a hypertext documentation system admittedly. It happens to have been invented pretty much simultaneously with another you may have heard of, the World Wide Web. A system with slightly greater user familiarity. And Free Software implementations. Debian's 'dwww' is an interesting marriage of multiple docuentation formats. It presents manpages, info pages, Debian package information, and additional documentation, all categorised and indexed, and accessible through a web browser from your local system. Including, as it happens, console mode browsers (lynx, w3m, elinks, links2, etc.). Which tends to amp up and standardise access to all of the above. dwww is the one thing which makes info actually useful. Which is a shame as there really is some quite good info documentation, it's just buried under what is for most people, an impenetrable interface.