The Linux shell is your friend

Shell Shocked

Paul Brown

The shell may look like an old-fashioned bit of technology, only useful for the Linux hardcore programmers and system administrators, but knowing a few commands and how to link them together goes long way.

The Linux shell is peculiar old thing. It was developed in the '70s for UNIX computers, and its look and feel has not change much in its forty years of existence. So, what's the deal? Surely we have transcended having to type in obscure commands on a black background. Is this not something reminiscent of the bad old days when floppy disks could hold only a few hundred bytes of data and phosphor green monitors burnt your eyeballs right out of their sockets?

In modern Linux distros, such as Ubuntu, you can spend your whole life within your graphical desktop and not have to deal with a command line once. You can download software, adjust configurations, copy and move files, and start and stop system processes by clicking, dragging, and dropping. What's the point, then, of such an arcane tool?

You could never leave the safe haven of your graphical desktop, true, but you'd definitely be missing out. When we worked on Linux Magazine Spain, from time to time – every year more or less – we produced a special Shell edition that brought together the best articles on shell usage, as well as new material we hadn't been able to fit into other issues. The shell issues were invariably a hit. They would outsell regular issues three to one, and people would order them from us well after they had been taken off the newsstands.

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