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  • From: James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] long filenames 34
  • Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 08:26:10 -0500

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 09:58:11PM +1300, 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:
> Greg Mayman wrote:
> >
> > And doing dumb exercises from the linux CLI isn't
> > going to help me either.
>
> I'm surprised to hear a DOS user refer to the command
> line as dumb.

I'm pretty attached to mc and feel disoriented on any Linux system that
doesn't have it installed. I'm not going to get
into the philosophical underpinnings of that, though, since I see it as
largely an exercise in futility (if the aim is
to convince anyone of something rather than just to explain why I do what I
do). But there's one very fundamental and
powerful secret to the command line that no one has yet pointed out yet to
Greg. With it, doing dumb exercises can
actually help one learn the command line quite quickly. What am I referring
to? Command-line auto-completion. Let's say
you want to do something from the command line, Greg, and you're not sure of
the command. You have some ideas of what
it could be, or perhaps a vague memory. Let's say it's editing a file, and
you suspect that the command may begin with
the letter "e."

Enter "e" on the command line and then hit the tab key. You'll see one of two
things: either Linux will complete what
you've written and the necessary command will appear or, if there's more than
one command on the system that starts
with the letter "e," nothing will appear but the system beep will sound. In
the second case, if you hit the tab key
again, Linux (bash, actually) will list onscreen for you all the commands
that begin with the letter "e." It should be
obvious how you can learn what commands are on your system this way: you
could go through the whole alphabet doing a
similar thing. The only further observation on this I have time for is to
point out that the more letters you enter for
the desired command at the command line before hitting the enter key, the
more likely it will be that auto-completion
will work the first time (i.e., will complete the command you want, as oppsed
to showing you a list of possibilities).
Auto-completion also works for entering directory and file names at the
command line.

It took me a year or two to learn about this, but it has proven quite
indispensible since then.

James




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