Terminal

[Brian McKee]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 8:31 AM, Steve Brettell <sbrettell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm very new to Linux, and frankly, can't afford the price of the books I've
> found in the bookstores.  So I'm leeching off the interwebs.  I don't have
> much to contribute right now, unless questions that bring good answers are a
> contribution.

Absolutely.  Ask a question.  If it gets answered, then that's
available in Google for the next person with the same problem.
Posting questions you can't answer on your own after Googling and
trying to figure it out independantly  *is* contributing - because
somebody else *will* have the same problem.

> That said, is there any kind of a tutorial about using the terminal
> effectively?  It looks to me like this is the heart of Linux country.

Something you may not realize is that the various terminal programs
all put you in something called a 'shell'.

That 'shell' is just like your desktop - it has rules and patterns and
does things a certain way.

Where it can get confusing is that there is more than one 'shell',
just like KDE and Gnome and Windows are all different GUIs.

The most commonly used shell, the default in Ubuntu, is called 'bash'
   (a shortform with a long history)

Where I'm going with this long winded explaination is this - you might
get better results from Google if you started searching for
information on using 'bash' the shell, rather than the generic word
'terminal'.

Oh,  and this link might be helpful too -
<http://linuxcomand.org/learning_the_shell.php>

Brian