The Dreaded Command Line

By Geoff Richards

http://training.gbdirect.co.uk/courses/linux/

Talk in Portable Document Format (PDF)

1. The Unix and Linux Command Line

  • Typed commands were first used for necessity
    • Only interface to the computer was a simple and slow terminal
  • But the command line is still a powerful and efficient interface for many types of work

2. Pros and Cons

  • The command line still has its place:
    • Typing commands can be quicker than getting to the same functionality with a mouse
    • Commands can be very powerful, in ways GUIs rarely are
    • Newer shells have many features to make commands easier to type
  • But graphical interfaces are also useful:
    • The command line makes no sense for some things, like editing graphics
    • Easier to get into — you can see what options are open to you
  • Both command line and graphical interfaces have a place in modern Unix and Linux

3. What’s Involved

  • The command line relies on three things:
    • The terminal, which displays the output of commands and echos what you type
    • The shell, which reads commands and works out what to do about them
    • The commands themselves — Unix and Linux have a vast array of small programs which can be run from a shell

Diagram showing a
shell talking to a terminal, with the user interacting with the terminal, and
the shell interacting with various programs

4. The Terminal

  • Lets you ‘get at’ the shell to work with it
  • Usually a program which opens a window in a graphical environment, like xterm, konsole, gnome-terminal, …
  • A program displays text on the terminal, and receives key-presses from it
    • Communication done with a simple protocol, using escape sequences for special things
  • The shell you are using might be connected over a network
    • Things like rsh and (much better) ssh make this work
    • So the command line is just as powerful when used on a remote machine

5. The Shell

  • The shell is your interface to the machine
  • On Linux the most commonly used shell is Bash
    • The ‘Bourne again shell’ — a reincarnation of the original Unix shell by Steve Bourne
    • Compatible with the original, but has many new features
  • The shell does three things every time you enter a command:
    • Reads lines of text from the user
    • Interprets commands and works out what to do with them
    • For most commands, runs one or more programs to do the work

6. Some Examples of Commands

  • $ represents the prompt — don’t type it
  • Ask a philosophical question:
    $ whoami
    geoffr
  • Copy a file:
    $ cp report.txt report-backup.txt
  • View a PostScript file:
    $ gv unix_command_line.ps
  • Output a message:
    $ echo hello, world
    hello, world

7. Filename Completion

  • Commands are often used to manipulate or examine files
    • So there’s a lot of tedious filenames to type…
  • The shell can do a lot of the typing for you:
    • Type the start of a filename
    • Type TAB
    • The shell will type the rest of the name, if there’s only one file whose name starts like that
  • For example, if the only file starting with rep is called report.txt:
    $ less rep<TAB>
  • If there are several files which Bash thinks you might mean, press TAB again to get a list of possible completions

8. Other Completion Goodies

  • Completion also works for commands
    • Type the start of a program name and see what it completes to
    • Handy for finding programs when you were only guessing they existed
  • As the shell completes filenames, it escapes special characters automatically
    • Makes it much easier to type filenames containing spaces and such
  • After a $ symbol, the shell completes variable names

9. History

  • Another handy feature of modern shells is history
  • The shell keeps a record of each command you type
  • Pressing Up and Down keys scrolls through the history, retrieving each command
    • Emacs users may prefer to use Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N
  • After going back to a command it can be edited and rerun
  • It is possible to search back through the history
    • Type Ctrl+R, and then any part of the original command line
  • The shell can save the history between logins

10. Globbing

  • The shell can collect filenames for a command to use
    • Write a glob pattern, and the shell will find files whose names match it
  • For example, to delete all files in the current directory:
    $ rm *
  • To count words in all the files whose names end in .txt:
    $ wc *.txt
  • * means “anything is allowed here”
  • Other symbols can be used too:
    • ? means “any single character is allowed here”
    • [a-z] means “any lowercase letter can go here”

11. Redirection

  • A command can be ‘connected‘ to input and output files
    • The shell does this, setting it up before running the appropriate program
    • Done with the < and > symbols
  • For example, to write a copy of this year’s calendar to a file:
    $ cal 2003 >2003.txt

Diagram showing the output of the cal program being redirected into a file called 2003.txt

  • < is the same, but reads from the file

12. Piping

  • Similar to redirection — but connects a program to another program
  • Use the | symbol — often called the ‘pipe character’
  • For example, pipe the output of echo into the program rev (which reverses each line of its input):
    $ echo Happy Birthday | rev
    
    yadhtriB yppaH
  • The output of the echo command is fed into the input
    of rev:

Diagram showing
output from echo being piped into rev, whose output flows onto a
terminal

13. Shell Scripting

  • Put a load of command lines into a file, and it’s called a shell script
    • Same idea as a Windows ‘batch file’, but much more powerful
  • Shell scripts can use looping, variables and other programming features
    • But these can also be used interactively
    • Useful for running the same command on many files, or creating a whole set of users in one go, or…
  • If you end up typing the same sequence of commands over and over again, turn them into a shell script
    • But if you want to write a ‘full size’ program, learn Perl

14. So…

  • Unix and Linux shells can be complicated and tricky, and are certainly feared by the uninitiated
    • But those who are practiced at them find them powerful and efficient
  • Not as much typing is involved as you might think
    • Completion saves your fingers
    • History lets you go back and try again
  • The shell is not for everyone, but well worth learning for anyone serious about Linux

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