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What helps people get comfortable on the command line? (jvns.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If their comfort level is limited due to lack of experience, I tend to sandbox them somehow and then walk them through a couple examples of “danger” vs “ok, this definitely won’t be irreversibel if it’s wrong, but I think it will do what I want.”

A couple of my go tos are the obvious rm -rf / vs ./ and a sed with and without -i on some random text file.

That naturally segues to “here’s the man page, here’s how to use it and search it.”

That tends to give them some confidence that they won’t accidentally cause real damage, and make it seem like they aren’t just typing arcane magic spells, but actually understanding how to responsibly put the pieces together.