Scared of the Linux Command Line? We Walk You Through it.
Linux’s graphical user interface is improving, but there comes a time when we all must descend into that scary and obscure world of the Linux command line. Though communicating with your computer via keyboard rather than mouse can be a bit intimidating at first, most people find that picking up just a few simple commands can go a long way toward making them much more efficient and happy Linuxniks.
Linux’s graphical user interface is improving, but there comes a time when we all must descend into that scary and obscure world of the Linux command line. Though communicating with your computer via keyboard rather than mouse can be a bit intimidating at first, most people find that picking up just a few simple commands can go a long way toward making them much more efficient and happy Linuxniks.
Have you ever asked an older nerd about the first computer they ever used? For me, this was a huge IBM system ensconced in a sacred glass-walled air-conditioned room. To run a program you had to leave a stack of punched cards and come back the next day to pick up the results. The trick to running two or three programs at a time was to stay really late and maybe buy the computer operator a pizza.
Fast forward about 10 years. The latest model of IBM’s mainframe is out, and now when you go to the computer center you get to sit at a terminal and run programs yourself. While the hardware has improved and you can now play with the computer via a keyboard and screen rather than punch cards, the heart of that big mainframe is still pretty much the same as it was a decade earlier.
This is the world into which Unix was born. There were no graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Computers were big and tended to be very expensive to run, and all operations were…
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