What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
What helps people get comfortable on the command line?
Sometimes I talk to friends who need to use the command line, but are intimidated by it. I never really feel like I have good advice (I’ve been using the command line for too long), and so I asked some people on Mastodon:
if you just stopped being scared of the command line in the last year or three — what helped you?
This list is still a bit shorter than I would like, but I’m posting it in the hopes that I can collect some more answers. There obviously isn’t one single thing that works for everyone – different people take different paths.
I think there are three parts to getting comfortable: reducing risks, motivation and resources. I’ll start with risks, then a couple of motivations and then list some resources.
I'd add ImageMagick for image manipulation and conversion to the list. I use it to optimize jpg's which led me to learn more about bash scripting.
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I knew basic CLI commands (such as
cdandls) for a while, but did not do learn much more. Some things have helped me grow my skills:- Necessity: Some times I need to do something on a VM or container that does not have a graphical interface installed. Some utilities only have a command line interface and not a graphical client. My only option is to Google how to do it. The more I do it, the less I have to Google and the more focused my searches become (instead of searching for "How to do x", I search for "How to do x in utility").
- Learning from others: For many tasks, I follow internal or external guides, which typically use CLI commands. Often I look at how my coworkers accomplish tasks and pay attention to what commands they use. Then, when I have time, I look up any new commands I saw and decide if they will be useful for me too. Lately, I have been doing code reviews that involve shell scripts. Those are especially nice, because I can take my time, going line by line, and understand what each command does.
- Keep notes: Every time I find a command that I think I will need again, I copy it into a text file (and I have many such text files). It also makes it easier when I need to run the command with slightly different arguments (a different commit id or something), I can just edit the command in my editor (with searching and undo) and paste it in to my terminal with all the flags and arguments correct.
2nd on the keep notes suggestion. I work on lots of unrelated projects, and each time I end up learning a bunch of new command line utilities, so I try to leave behind a text file describing some of the most useful commands I'd discovered that day. Usually helps me come back to a project and not be back at square one every time.