Computing from the Command Line Linux command line tools and Shell Scripting for beginner to intermediate level users

This ebook aims to teach Linux command line tools and Shell Scripting for bner to intermediate level users. The main focus is towards managing your files and perfog text processing tasks. Plenty of examples are provided to make it easier to understand a particular tool and its various features. Exercises at the end of chapters will help you practice what you've learned and solutions are provided for reference. External links are provided for further reading.

The features covered in this ebook are shaped and limited by my own experiences since 2007. I had a rough bning as a design eeer having to learn Linux command line, Vim and Perl on the job. The biggest pain points were not knowing about handy options (for example, grep color to highlight matching portions, find -exec to apply commands on filtered files, etc) and tools (for example, xargs to workaround limitations of too many command line arguments). And then there were tools like sed and awk with intimidating syntax.

I hope this ebook would make it much easier for you to discover CLI tools, features and learning resources than my own blundering experience.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with basic computer usage, know fundamental terms like files and directories, how to install programs and so on. You should also be already comfortable with programming basics like variables, loops and functions.

In terms of software, you should have access to the GNU bash shell and commonly used Linux command line tools. This could be as part of a Linux distribution or via other means such as a Virtual Machine, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and so on.

You are also expected to get comfortable with reading manuals, searching online, visiting external links provided for further reading, tinkering with illustrated examples, asking for help when you are stuck and so on. In other words, be proactive and curious instead of just consuming the content passively.

Testimonials

Ive only gotten through first pages but appears a good Unix/bash pr. I’ll probably recommend for new hires out of bootcamp because they’re usually weak here — feedback on twitter

GitHub repo

Visithttps://github.com/learnbyexample/cli-computing for markdown source, example files, exercise solutions and other details related to the book.

Interactive exercises

I made an interactive TUI app for a few exercises from this book. I hope to create a more comprehensive app for all the exercises someday.

Chapters

Preface

Introduction and Setup

Command Line Overview

Managing Files and Directories

Shell Features

Viewing Part or Whole File Contents

Searching Files and Filenames