Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Linux for Dummies?

Author:Wesley Felter
Posted:12/3/1998; 6:07:51 PM
Topic:Linux for Dummies?
Msg #:750 (In response to 749)
Prev/Next:749 / 751

Welcome! Prepare to have your mind expanded in ways that no drugs can do, and you get an even worse headache (from what I've heard).

I haven't really found any good documentation, as I learned everything by watching over other people's shoulders.

As a good start, fire up a terminal. (I forget where KDE puts it; I ditched KDE for Window Maker.) KDE has something like the Finder called kfm, but I use 'ls' and 'cd' instead.

Some of the commands that I find really useful when figuring things out are:

which: tells you what file will be executed when running a command. try 'which perl'

locate: the Linux answer to Sherlock. 'locate perl' would return so many matches that you'd probably want to use 'locate perl | more'

man: the "manual" for the system. 'man perl' gives a high-level overview of the Perl docs. There should be a "man page" for every command on your system.

I have a feeling that there's a good O'Reilly nutshell book for this, but I can't afford books, so I don't really know.

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