from Hacker News

What helps people get comfortable on the command line?

by _peregrine_ on 8/18/23, 12:05 PM with 5 comments

• by RugnirViking on 8/18/23, 5:14 PM

  Its the same sort of reason why "kids are good at computers" is a thing. Turns out if you don't know to be afraid you can just start doing things and seeing what happens. It's a sort of mental block I encountered a lot when I used to tutor people with computers and electronics. As people get older they start to assign infinate value to things they have stored away while being too afraid to actually go and check what is there, so they become afraid to change anything

  Ultimately it comes down to an attittude of "so what?" - So long as our important memories are backed up/somwhere else, and we're using github properly, there isnt likely to be anything hugely important we can destroy. And i've not seen anyone fully wipe a system yet anyways, its ususally something more like deleting the system installation of python, or messing up something internal in apt. Those can be fixed and turn into valuable learning themselves

• by eternityforest on 8/19/23, 8:00 AM

  > Aliasing rm to a tool like safe-rm or rmtrash so that you can’t accidentally delete something you shouldn’t (or just rm -i)

  Nope, not happening. I think I would learn to be less careful. I am a big fan of predictability and control and avoid customized stuff, and I don't really like doing the same thing in different ways(not sure if that's the best for brain health long term but it sure is less confusing and seems less error prone).

  Instead I just... Don't use rm. And if I have to I will triple check it. It's not something I want to "get comfortable with", manual file management is something the GUI is good at, so I use the GUI. Same with dd. I use the pi flasher util, or etcher for non-pi things.

  For the stuff you do want to learn I think a killer app is the most important. I doubt most people would even care about cli at all without one.

  For me, it's SSH, and being able to programmatically tell a raspi to not destroy it's own SD card in dumb ways with nonsense writes. And GNU units.

  I don't have a folder of little personal use scripts laying around, I think a lot of that is overrated outside specific use cases that I don't do a lot of work with. But nonetheless for the maybe 2% of tasks I think are well suited for shell it's pretty great.

• by kevinwang on 8/18/23, 4:38 PM

  definitely the social points for me -- shoulder surfing / pair programming in both directions (me learning things by watching others, and others teaching me commands while watching me)

• by gammalost on 8/18/23, 7:47 PM

  It came for me by using Arch for a year, I had no other choice but to use the commandline sometimes