Terminal/shell training/reference guides?

[alexjdale]

Hi folks,

I'm quite comfortable working in the shell, but the majority of our support staff have Windows backgrounds and I've been trying to find a good resource for Terminal/shell usage to get them out of the GUI mindset. They will be much more effective if they are able to navigate the shell, run commands, read error outputs, etc. (SSH alone is a huge time saver, and techs could assist without interrupting the user).

Has anyone run across a site or resource that they use for basic training? I haven't found anything suitable in my searches, they generally seem to be "tips and tricks" for average users.

Thanks,
Alex

[SeanA]

Some bookmarks I have stored that may help:

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/
http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/basic.shtml
http://www.tldp.org/guides.html

[tlarkin]

Hi @alexjdale

I have pretty much used the links @SeanA has posted. I used the tldp.org link a ton. The best way to learn is with a project. Back in the day when I was working in a Novell shop (yeah so I guess I am aging myself here), we were converting Netware to SuSe. During that time we had about 10,000 PCs that we managed with those tools, and we just implemented Zen Imaging from Novell over PXE boot. I did not like the interface so I wrote an interactive shell script that allowed users to pick and image and it was automated. This was my very fist ever shell script put into production, a very long time ago. I had a project, it meant a lot to me that I stream line this process because I was one of the techs that had to reimage the 10,000 PC devices. So, in the end the PXE boot environment ran a small Linux distro, that when it booted, ran my script, and all the tech had to do was pick one of the like 6 options displayed on the screen and the rest was automated.

That is how I got started, and it basically flung me into learning a lot more and before you know it I was writing all sorts of code to automate certain tasks. I would say give them a simple project, like having a shell script grab some variables and then call Applescript to open an app, or System Preferences or something the like.

So, I strongly suggest the learning be project oriented with goals in mind. Just my 2 cents, take it with a grain of salt.

Thanks,
Tom

[ooshnoo]

http://www.manpagez.com is one of the first places I go...

[bentoms]

I use this: http://ss64.com/

But, back in the days of the mailing list I used to use @tlarkin!

[GaToRAiD]

Here is a great website I used at first.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/