Linux And the Command Line Slides and Info

Which?

Some Claim

The mouse was literally the worst thing to happen to computers.

Why?

“Caveman interface.”
Pre-linguistic/animal-like
“Point and grunt”

(Tablets and even “Minority Report” are cool and fun...but why is Charades a game?)

It's so easy..

Why Command Line

Because you can very quickly say/relate complex concepts in a concise way, by combining a series of simple symbols.

You know, like talking. Or writing.

Command line is the act of literally talking to the computer....unlike...

Intelligence requires Language

Buttons and gestures are frequently convenient for repetitive tasks...

...but to do anything intelligent,
you need LANGUAGE.

TEXT. Numbers and Letters.

Quick rant

Yes, I do think a *lot* of this UI/UX stuff is an enormous waste of time.
Especially since we have collectively "rediscovered" how good language can be,
in the form of Siri, Alexa et al.

Quick rant, more

(a waste of time and perhaps "ableist" as well.)

Know how to make your interface "ADA compliant" or otherwise definitely works everywhere?

ONLY USE TEXT.

Quick rant part deux

Big differences though, roughly:

Many of these boil down to: SIMPLE vs EASY

Or, I should probably say, a particular couple of ways to
redefine SIMPLE and EASY.

SIMPLE: (Think "command line")

and use MORE language to get things done.

EASY: (Think "iPhone" or "Siri")

Quick rant part deux

Big differences though, roughly:

Command line =
"Unfriendly, but a great deal of power and possibility through simplicity"

Siri /Alexa =
"Friendly, but very little power and lots of complexity, and it only lets you do like seven things" ☺

What is programming

(all computer languages are for humans!)
Changing your screensaver
Writer/Word
Calc/Excel
HTML/CSS
Bash
PHP/MYSQL/Javascript
Python/Perl/Ruby interpreted/scripted
C compiled
Assembly (00 4E A3 77 8C 0A etc)

What is coding, anyway?

Good question.
What is taught as coding is usually:
“IN THE BEGINNING”

e.g.

What is coding anyway?

It's nearly always presented as...

print “Hello world”;

and/or

(as if you were starting from scratch)

Real Programming Languages

But perhaps we should be doing .. "scripting?"

Try to remember..

At a point in history, this was the ONLY
way to interact with the computer

AND

The "users" were the "programmers"
NO HAND HOLDING

Also — "The Unix Way"

The First Draft...

  1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".
  2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
  3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
  4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.

Bash/Shell Scripting

Shell Scripting - Command line

That default thing that comes up on all the unixy-linuxy systems everywhere.

It’s a text interface. You type commands into it and the computer responds.
And it’s also a "programming" language. As in, you can type in more than one command in a row, save it to a file, and run the file. So, you know, "programming."

Names of things

Fundamental ideas:

(ignore basic programming ideas like "objects" for now)

One way to divide ALL FILES

TEXT and BINARY. That's all, really.

(open it in a text program like gedit or leafpad or notepad. Can you kind of read any of it?)

NOTE: Remember, frequently you can convert one to the other, e.g. ZIPs

TEXT, .e.g.

Text
HTML
XML
.ini

BINARY, e.g.

Executables (bin, exe)
ZIP
ISO
jpg
MP3
MP4

More on "Text"

PROGRAMMING AND HOW TO SOUND SMART

Nearly any (real) language CAN do what any other real language CAN do...

If you want to sound smart say:

Turing Machine or Turing Complete

and

Lambda Calculus

PROGRAMMING AND HOW TO SOUND SMART

Nearly any (real) language CAN do what any other real language CAN do...

PROGRAMMING AND HOW TO SOUND SMART

Nearly any (real) language CAN do what any other real language CAN do...

A Basic Linuxy Filesystem

Users and Permissions..

..actually mean something today

ROOT – Like “Administrator” or maybe “God”
users – humans
(..and others – fake “users” to get tasks done)

Some systems (eg Ubuntu) allow for Super Users
S.U.- do “this” = sudo

CLASSIC COMEDY

Permissions

Three major things you can do with files

Three important “groups”

Permissions for Directories

..are weird

(create new/delete existing files, or rename them)

Practical Permission Problems

Commands in theory

Any IMPERATIVE action the computer can do. Can be one word or more.

Ultimately, will be an ORDER, usually expressible as a VERB

Are VERY closely related to (if not identical) to FUNCTIONS/METHODS

"Computer! Do THIS!"

ls

Commands in theory

Since we're in the command line we are always acting on:

FILES and/or TEXT. These will be input and/or output.

if commands are VERBS, the FILES and TEXT are the nouns/objects
We call these expressions

(and of course, the TEXT can lead you to something else, like a FOLDER) 

cat file.txt
echo "Hi there"
ls "/home/mine"

Nearly every command can act on either TEXT or FILES or BOTH.

Commands in Theory

We've talked VERBS and NOUNS. But we might want to modify the operation of things;
Think ADVERBS and/or ADJECTIVES:

On the command line, these are called options

one dash + letter (ls -a)
two dashes + words (sort --reverse)

Getting Help

but seriously, Google/Duckduckgo etc

File Manipulation

Viewing Text and Files

cat - "Good" example of "efficiency" at the expense of "redundancy"
i.e. it means "concatenate" — which is to squish two files together and print to the screen. But it can also do it with just one file.

less - this is such a terribly bad joke I hate even explaning it

Let's slow down here,

because here is the power:

One way to describe cat - It "shows you the file"

BUT, let's be VERY precise here:
Cat TAKES A LINE OF TEXT (that refers to a file)..
and PRINTS IT ON THE SCREEN

TAKES A LINE OF TEXT = "Standard Input or stdin"

PRINTS IT ON THE SCREEN "Standard Output or stdout"

Pipes and Redirects

Default is to read from stdin, and write to stdout.
But by changing the default NOW YOU'RE PLAYING WITH POWER

(interesting then , cat goes from FILE to TEXT, and > goes from TEXT to FILE )

BIG OVERARCHING POINT..

THAT'S MY OPINION

If it works and its clearer to you, don't let the supernerds tell you it's a bad idea e.g.
"Useless use of cat" IS FINE

BASH

BASH (Bourne Again) Shell - others are fish and zsh, etc

Lots of “tricks” are available here, eg

and many MANY more...

BASH

Furthermore, you can modify this environment to fit your needs, via:
.bashrc
(stuff here will be run everytime you open a terminal)

A great example is the “alias” command. If a command doesn't exist for what you want to do, just ,ake up your own!

alias modbash='nano ~/.bashrc'

Newer Shells

You may see some like
"zsh" or "Zshell"
or Fish
or Oilshell

Roughly, they're a bit nicer to use, but are not "backwards compatible"
which may not matter. Feel free to try them out!

(later on, be careful when NOT using them interactively/as a REPL)

Viewing Files

IN TERMINAL

ALSO

Opening Files

COMMAND/ARGUMENT STYLE

Keeping it simple at first:

SORT

sorting text

GREP

searching text for matches

grep OPTIONS PATTERN (FILE)
Can search over FILES or STDIN
Also, can search ONE FILE or MANY (check -d or -R)
useful flags:
-i (case insensitive)
-v (invert search/show NON-matches)
-l (just show matching FILES, not lines)

(see also "ripgrep" or rg)

Classic Bash Commands

- sed
- awk
- find
- locate

Some nicer ones

head
and
tail

for getting only part of a file, by lines

tr

"Transliterate"

Easier way to do SINGLE CHARACTER deletions or transforms
(but can act on "groups," like "A-Z"

cut

Nice way to cut up lines. Just specify the "delimiter"
(the character you'll divide on)
and "which field" by number

echo "first:second:third" | cut -d ':' -f2
yields second

CLI vs GUI

Command Line Interface

vs.

Graphical User Interface
(but, why not both)

CLI, but GUIish

(hardcore nerds may distinguish and call these TUIs)

"ncurses"

From CLI to GUI

firefox http://jrm4.com
or
firefox /home/myuser/html/testindex.html

(NOTE, closing the terminal may also close the program)