1y ago

Where to "practice Linux" terminal commands

I've been using Linux for about 7 months now and have become a lot more comfortable using the terminal but I feel like there is more that I can learn.

Most of my work is done in a browser or DaVinci Resolve. I do try to use the terminal where possible but it's limited due to my workflow.

Are there any interactive sites where I can practice/learn the terminal? I'm going through Linux Survival at the moment.

EDIT: I forgot to add some important details.

I don't have a massive need for the terminal for my current workflow but I think it is important to know (looks good for any future job applications as well) and expand your knowledge on things that interest you when possible.

In the future, I hope to have a home lab/NAS running Linux. I will most likely SSH into that and I'd like to deal with any issues via the terminal.

I use Arch btw (technically EndeavourOS)

65 comments

I have never practiced using the terminal. The only way I learned was using the terminal to do my tasks and fix things when they broke.
In the future, I hope to have a home lab/NAS running Linux
Just start this project. That will teach you about how to use the terminal in a practical setting
- Want to add a few things to try
  Create a new file and edit it with nano.
  Create and navigate directories
  Copy a folder to another spot
  Update your system and install a package with pacman
  Start, stop, and check the status of a service. Maybe sshd
  Use find and grep to find all files with a certain extension (this will involve the wildcard character *
  This is just a small list off the top of my head. Doing your everyday tasks with the terminal is a great way to start to understand how it works.
  Watch this video to understand the Unix philosophy towards tools (this is obviously outdated now but I find it very interesting and it gives a great intro to Unix-like systems from the programmers perspective)
  
  Use find and grep to find all files with a certain extension (this will involve the wildcard character *
  I definitely need to practice using find and grep. When I do need to use them I almost always need to look up the command
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Watch this video to understand the Unix philosophy towards tools
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This website has a bunch of great practice "wargames". You'll learn a bunch about common linux commands and the different options for them. It also provides you with some great tips on what to google if you get stuck. I reccomend starting with bandit.
https://overthewire.org/
- I recommend this to everyone I meet in tech, it's really good to learn linux and file system skills
Not specific for learning, but you can put any command into ExplainShell and it breaks down the individual parts for you.
- That's super useful, thanks!
I'd suggest https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/
- This is exactly what I’m looking for, thank you!
  
  Glad to help :)
  Also absolutely start your homelab. Its how I crash coursed everything and its the template I use to teach others about linux.
In m opinion, practicing with real life problems is the best teacher. There are some ways to cut and convert videos, audio and images via terminal. Maybe there is still a way to enrich or streamline your workflow with that. Maybe a script which will prepare the folder of your next project. Also, xdotools let you automate a lot of sometimes tedious routines.
The Linux Experiment fairly recently made a video about this: https://tilvids.com/w/w5SrXQUhk1a5iEtE9xPWgS
If you just want the links:
https://linuxjourney.com/
https://training.linuxfoundation.org/resources/?_sft_content_type=free-course
https://linuxcommand.org/
https://cmdchallenge.com/
I also recommend learnlinux.tv and especially the YouTube channel
Since you're on Arch, the Arch Wiki is a great resource if you ever need to look something up. If you just want to improve your CLI skills and make the life in the Terminal more pleasant, I'd recommend the fish shell. (Check this out if you want a video demonstration) It has a great autocomplete feature and shows you a short description of each command, which might help you to learn more about it. It's also very flexible and customizable. (Check out this video for some neat tricks) My last recommendation is tldr, it's a very useful application that gives you a short summary of how to use a command. These summaries are much easier to read and understand than manpages. I assume you know about manpages, if not, that's another recommendation.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  the YouTube channel
  this
  this video
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As many here have said, but I will emphasize: learn the Bash programming language. Linux Survival is a very good start, and you can just start experimenting right away in your own terminal on your own computer.
To go more in depth, you can read through the manual on your computer by typing "info bash". The Info documentation browser is a command line app. You may need to install it using your package manager ("apt-get" or "pacman" or "dnf").
In the "info" app, you can navigate with the arrow keys, pressing enter on hyperlinks, typing l (lowercase "L") works like the "back" button in a web browser, typing r (lowercase "R") works like the "forward" button. Info also lets you search the index by pressing i (lowercase "I") then entering your search in the prompt, or search the full text by pressing s and entering your search in the prompt. And q quits back to the command line prompt. "Ctrl-Z" pauses the "Info" app and drops you back into the command line, and you can resume your "info" session using the "%" (percent sign) command.
Another thing that can help is to learn about the GNU "Coreutils", this is a suite of commands usually installed into /usr/bin or /bin which provides helpful command line utilities. These are commands like cat, wc, sort, cut, ls, du, cp, ln, chmod and many others. Read through the Coreutils Info manual by typing "info coreutils".
And I will also reiterate recommendations from others: learn how to use Vim and/or Emacs. Vim has the more difficult learning curve but is extremely useful for writing scripts. Emacs is better though because it lets you split-screen with manual pages, and copy-paste commands between Man pages, "Infodoc" documents, the shell, and/or a text file, all using only keyboard commands. I think it makes it much easier to learn since everything is integrated together. Ask the Emacs community how to get started if you are interested.
- Thank you for such a detailed response.
  I've tried learning Vim previously but I never really gave it as much time as I should have. I haven't tried Emacs yet, I'll have a look at that as well.
I think you might like DIstroSea. If you'd like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you'd like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.
- I will repeat it once again... Why would you use subpar Type 2 virtualization and DKMS with VirtualBox when there's a perfectly viable UI for the kernel's built-in Type 1 hypervisor (Qemu being the userland): https://virt-manager.org/
  
  I'm not the biggest fan of VBox either, it's just very popular and full of sequential "wizards" to guide the user along the process of creating VMs, so it might be one way to get started. I'd much rather work with QEMU though.
- That looks interesting. I like the idea of trying to emulate a system only using the command line - I learn a lot from hands-on projects like this
  
  That might be fun then.
  QEMU can be as simple as this:
  
  qemu-img create -f qcow2 mydisk.qcow2 20G
  Here you are first creating a disk image with the format qcow2 and maximum 20G capacity. This is a QEMU disk image format that will take up very little space and grow as you use up the VM disk.
  
  qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256M -cdrom alpine.iso mydisk.qcow2
  This will start a VM with 256MB of RAM, the alpine.iso image in its virtual CD/DVD slot, and the disk image you just created as a virtual drive. This will come with networking enabled by default, so you'll have internet access from within the VM.
  It should now drop you into the Alpine installation. Alpine is very lightweight so it's great for experimenting, but you could do virtually the exact same for most other flavors of Linux and BSD images out there.
  Once you are done installing, you can power off the VM and then start it with this:
  
  qemu-system-x86_64 -m 2G mydisk.qcow2
  That's basically the same without the -cdrom argument, this time with 2GB of RAM. I find QEMU a delight to play with because it has sane defaults like that. Hope you have fun too!
Cost: $10
One year of a small vps. Fiddle around with it, get it secure, run some services on it, flatten and reinstall through the web kvm when you fuck up.
Look at your logs and be terrified at how many computers are just out there poking and prodding at random ips on the internet.
Say “I’m in” and push play on squarepusher when you log in.
- Pardon me for asking, but this looks very strange. 10$ a year, when most VPS hosts I see are 5$ish a month, and the website is default WordPress stuff with literally nothing in their knowledge base, and two blog posts. Also your link is to https://cloudserver.net Where as when I lookup the name, https://www.cloudserver.net/. A totally different looking website. What is this?
  
  It’s the link from lowendbox.com’s list of cheap vpses. I’ve used a few of em including cloudserver and they’re fine. Cloudserver actually did the most kyc stuff out of any on that list.
  Idk why the link is different or any of the stuff you’re talking about. It’s old, November of last year, but it still seems to work.
- +1 for just mentioning squarepusher
IMO the best knowledge comes from doing practical examples that actually interest you. I wouldn't rush that.
- This is the crux of my whole life. If I am not interested in something, my entire existence will basically refuse to soak up that knowledge or even try to empathize. It can sometimes suck. I have to walk away if people start engaging in conversations about sports.
  It got easier to start digging into CLI after realizing that would be an easy way to get the home media server up and running. And managing local game servers.
  It's a little harder to focus on vlans and firewall rules, outside of the repercussions of not setting that up correctly.
  
  Yeah, it's also very difficult for me to focus on something if I don't know where I'm going.
As many people have already said, just do what you need to do. That's the best way to learn. But if you are afraid you'll break your system with dangerous commands, use docker or a virtual machine for practice.
https://www.thc.org/segfault/
- Good lord. How on earth do they prevent people from abusing this to no end?
  
  Honeypot? Dunno. Good discussions about it on hacker news.
Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you're not really learning "Terminal" so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like "Bash examples" to get a feel for it.
If that's too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash's manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they're aimed at someone who's already somewhat competent.
Anyway, here's one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/
If Bash isn't what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don't think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.
To check what shell you're using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.
Finally, a bit of advice: Don't go running commands you see on the Internet unless you're sure what they're going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don't know or trust - I can't vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It's possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.
- And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don’t know or trust
  :(){:|:&};:
  
  This is the sort of thing I was talking about with "Don't go running commands [...] unless you're sure what they're going to do [...]"
  I did a breakdown of this one on the snoosite back in the day. Searching "fork bomb" on YouTube is probably a better way to get that breakdown these days.
- I’ll definitely give man some more love. Thanks for the advice
  
  Check out tldr as well. I generally use it far more often than man
I believe it isn't the terminal. You are looking for the shell. On arch, it is bash.
man bash
And then, because man pages are too hard for beginners, google for some bash tutorials.
In addition, you want to learn vi. One of the greatest tools of all times after 1969 :-)
Try to avoid using any file manager (uninstall them all if it is difficult to avoid running them). So you will practice in using file manipulation commands.
Cmdchallenge is similar to Linux survival. But is mostly command line basics like moving around directories, searching, etc. It also gives a list of solutions that people have used for each exercise, which is interesting just to see different ways of doing things.
Check out Raspberry Pi. Set up a streaming server, NAS, cloud storage. If you're interested in media, make an installation. There's tons of great projects available and I believe the best way to learn anything is by making something real, not just practicing random commands. Since it's Linux based, you'll learn a lot of practical uses of Linux and the power of being able to script Bash files.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/
Hope it helps.
Use a virtual machine inside virtual box, or docker, or some other container. Back when I started the os could literally break to CLI and I've have to learn to fix it with Google and another computer or my phone 😅. Instead of blindly pasting commands, read the man pages. After years I have a handful of useful commands I use and I really do find it easier to do certain things from cli vs GUI. It will come with time, don't worry.
https://darin755.github.io/browser-linux
VM or Container is easiest, depending on what you want to do.
What, things like sudo rm -f /
- that wouldn't do anything except give you an error that / is a directory
This is such a broad topic, its impossible to give an advice or place that works for everyone. What I would do is pick up a few common commands that are not destructive in their nature (no need to practice with rm command in example) and read its manual man grep and help grep --help . Then try to understand and play around with the options and dedicated test files. Search tutorials and tips for these specific commands you are learning about. Over time this should result in deeper understanding of various concepts, as as you learn about grep, you will also learn about pipes and files in general while you are researching.
Then you can move on to other commands. Maybe setup a virtual machine where you can experiment a bit more freely, but that's probably overkill. Also look what people do in their Bash scripts, as Bash is contains the commands you can use on the terminal too.
- I’ve been doing this to a lesser extent. Where possible I’d try to use the terminal to perform a task which would often require reading up about certain commands (either because they’re new to me or I’ve forgotten something). I suppose like anything it’ll take time for me to get more confident.
  
  Yeah, I'm this type of person, learning by doing. Doing dedicated courses or tutorials was never my thing. But other people are not me, right? Here is another website that might interest you: https://linuxjourney.com/
I recommend installing a Linux distribution that requires a hands-in approach like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you don't have an extra computer you can do it on a virtual machine on the computer you do have.
The process will require you to use the various incantations and rituals of using the terminal. As you do so, learn what they do by googling them or using their man page.
For more practice, write a shell script or otherwise choose a task you want to do using the terminal like browsing through your files or searching for a file whose name matches a pattern and so on.
https://geekflare.com/run-linux-from-a-web-browser/
/bin/bash
What's wrong with the terminal on your own machine? You can use a VM if you're afraid of breaking stuff.
But really, there's not much to learn about the terminal. You open it and type stuff, and read the stuff it says back. Beyond that you should learn your shell (bash, I assume, which has a manual and plenty of documentation) and the standard set of gnu coreutils (which also have their own manuals).
- It’s more a case of, I don’t know what I don’t know.
  I’ve been using my terminal (I’m not scared of breaking stuff) where possible and reading up on what command to use for certain use cases or refreshing my memory on how to use a certain command. I would like to expand on that knowledge.
Eh, just try new commands in your distro and see what happens -- "time is the best teacher of em all".

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