Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Are You in Terminal Love?

Are You in Terminal Love?

If you are a linux geek, I am pretty sure that you are in love with terminal. If you have surfed the internet looking for solutions in linux, you might often end up in sites giving you some commands over the terminal as the solution. This is the reason for many people to hate linux as it gives a perception that 'Terminal is the preferred GUI in Linux'. The irony is that it is the same fact that drive many to fall in love with linux.

Why terminals shoo away many?

All were obsessed with Microsoft Windows at least once in their lifetime and many are still sticking with it. Yes, we all were once used to Windows which tries to distance users as far away from their command prompt as possible. What was the result ?. These people (includes myself) were barred from realizing the potential of a Command Window. Yup, we were ignorant of the power of terminal. I tell you even MS-DOS is quite high powerful.

Why you should fall in love with terminal?

As afore-mentioned, we often had seen many sites telling us to do many things using terminal. When we were expecting lots of screen-shots, we are given a bunch of commands. Have you ever wondered, why was it so? The answer s quite simple - It is much easier for a person to copy & paste commands to a terminal window than following the steps shown in a sequence of screen-shots. Another advantage is that people often use different desktop environments, which means different graphical applications, and often one will have to provide a separate solution for each desktop environment. Be it any desktop environment, the terminal solution remains unique.

If you need a solution by typing a simple single command, you can always go with shell scripts. Shell scripts have the bunch of commands in a single file and running it means sequential execution of those commands..What you need to do is, just download the appropriate shell script and just run it in the terminal.

How to fall in love with Terminal?

1. Start using the terminal.

2. Learn some unix commands and try one by one in the terminal.

3. Use the commands 'man' and 'info' to learn about a Linux command. (How to use man & info at here.)

4. Learn a bit of shell scripting.

5. Use 'vim' editor while writing scripts and programs.

WRAP UP

Better late than never. Be aware of the potential of terminal commands and fall in love with terminal.

PS: This was originally posted on my blog- Blog-Jakes