Command Line TV

We use find and locate to dig up lists of files on our system that match certain criteria. We also look at xargs for executing commands on a selected set of files.

We investigate the standard filesystem hierarchy and some tools for managing filesystems.

We create shell scripts using the hash-bang header, and also look at permissions, variables, and loops in the shell.

We explore some more shell basics including redirection to and from files, and command substitution. This feature allows the output of one command to be used as parameters of another command.

In this episode, we explore some of the capabilities of package managers for installing and updating software on your system. Specifically, we look at the ‘apt’ system on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. On other systems, you might use Yum (RedHat/Fedora), Pacman (Arch), or Homebrew (Mac). This page shows a comparison of commands for several Linux packaging systems: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta

We look at ImageMagick, a powerful suite of command-line tools for doing image processing. With it, we resize, crop, blur, and do format-conversion on a collection of image files.

In this episode, we continue looking at managing files and directories using cp, rm, mkdir, and rmdir. We also show off the tree command and revisit creating an alias in our .bashrc.

We use mv to move and rename files, and create a shell alias to improve the safety of one of its sharp edges. We also introduce the .bashrc configuration script, and mkdir to create directories.

We learn about text manipulation commands like cut, sort, and uniq. We build sophisticated pipelines to analyze data, including surveys and web logs. We also look briefly at invoking simple text editors from the command line, like nano, gedit, and TextEdit.

In this episode, we use basic wildcards to select files, and then explore how the ‘grep’ command can search for words or phrases across multiple files. As always, you can follow along using the same directory structure by downloading it from https://github.com/commandlinetv/sample-files.

We look at viewing files using commands like cat, more, less, head, and tail, including using those in short pipelines. We also try opening files in external applications using open or xdg-open (and live dangerously by dumping a binary file with cat).

Welcome to Command Line TV, a new video podcast to help you learn and master the UNIX shell. In this first episode, we talk about our backgrounds, the scope of this endeavor, opening your terminal, and using basic commands like cd and ls to explore a directory tree. You can follow along using the same directory structure by downloading it from https://github.com/commandlinetv/sample-files. Note: we have a few minor problems in this first episode with audio synchronization and a somewhat noisy environment. It gets better in future episodes!