Taking Command of the Command Line
Topic Outline
- Getting help! - the manual pages (
man, options) - Readline (beginning/end of line, clear line, forward/back by word, search command history)
- Navigating and looking around (e.g.
cd,ls) - Looking at files and filtering (
cat,less,head,tail,grep) - Combining programs (pipes & redirection)
- Permissions (e.g.
chmod,chown,sudo,su) - Changing things (e.g.
mkdir,touch,mv,cp,rm) - Googling your filesystem (
find,grep -r) - Configuration (e.g. environment variables [especially
PATH], dotfiles,export,alias,which) - Process control - aka why the heck do I have 20 orphaned Spring processes running? (e.g.
jobs,ps,kill) - Shelling out from Ruby (
systemand backticks - watch out for command injection!)
Prerequisites / Setup
You'll want to be running one of MacOS, Linux, or Windows with the Windows Subsystem for Linux installed, and know how to start up your terminal and start up Bash. No assumed knowledge beyond that. If you're on Windows, please make sure you install WSL - Git Bash has some similarities, and your skills from this workshop will transfer to it, but it's missing many of the utilities you'll need.
You won't need to bundle install anything - just cloning the repository is sufficient!
Background
This workshop was originally prepared for RailsConf 2019, and was open-sourced to help out folks who aren't able to attend the workshop in person, but who still want to get started with the Unix command line.
Please feel free to open an issue if you have any questions! It doesn't have to be a mistake in the materials, though I'd like to hear about any of those you find as well!
Get in touch with me (@trptcolin) if you have any questions or would like me to facilitate this workshop at your conference or user group.
License
Copyright © 2019 Colin Jones
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - HTML summary