DEV Community

Cover image for What's one thing about Linux you wish you'd known?
Nočnica Mellifera for Heroku

Posted on

What's one thing about Linux you wish you'd known?

photo by Uwe Aranas

‘Linux’ shows up on many lists of skills that new developers should master. But that little name covers a massive scope of technology orders of magnitude more complex than any programming language or framework. When I hear that a new developer is trying to ‘learn Linux’ it sounds as daunting as a history student saying ‘I’m trying to learn everything about Europe.’

What's something you wish you'd known getting started?

Top comments (16)

Collapse
 
matstrange profile image
Mat Strange

Reverse search (ctrl r)
When someone showed me this it was a game changer and sped up things no end - no more endlessly going through this history line by line to find an old command you want to use again and hadn't copied to a scratch notepad!

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Technically, that's more a function of the shell you've chosen to use than a true Linuxism. Which is to say, you'll find that functionality on any OS that has a recent-enough version of BASH (possibly other interactive shells, too). ;)

Collapse
 
matstrange profile image
Mat Strange

Well as a linux beginner at the time, I was glad I gave it a BASH :D

Collapse
 
cyberjack profile image
CyberJack

I use fzf (a command line fuzzy finder) in addition to ctrl+r. Now I can easily search through my history.

See: github.com/junegunn/fzf

Collapse
 
nocnica profile image
Nočnica Mellifera

I love this

Collapse
 
evanplaice profile image
Evan Plaice

Partial name matching

Say you want to install a .deb file you just downloaded named...

some_really_long_name-v1.99.8764-beta-OMFG-this-name-is-annoyingly-long-and-case-sensitive

As long as the short version doesn't collide with another file name in the directory you can do.

dpkg -i ./some~

Case sensitivity in general was a difficult adjustment until I learned how to use regular expressions, aliases, and exports.

Collapse
 
fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

How to exit vi, because it literally took me a year to figure out.

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

Been using Linux since 1992 (0.98a). Unfortunately, that means that a lot of things that would have fallen into the "wish I'd known before..." category are no longer relevant. Also, I'd made the move to Linux after cutting my teeth on SunOS 4/BSD 4.3, NeXTSTEP, and early, early, early AIX. So, many of the UNIX-y idioscyncasies that tend to trip people up that are new to Linux, I'd already gotten past. =)

Collapse
 
nickelkr profile image
Kyle Nickel

To create aliases or functions for common operations. And also, that everything is a file.

Collapse
 
aurelmegn profile image
Aurel

Hello,
I would like to know GNU/Linux earlier
.. that it was not as hard as people said
.. that when using commands, you can speed up your work

I would like to had know about i3 earlier too, using it you feel another vision about your tools, (they should not drive you, you should drive them)

Collapse
 
tonyisworking profile image
Tony

It's not actually Linux, it's GNU/Linux...
Linux is the Kernel!

Collapse
 
fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

Lol, yeah I thought myself linux that is why it took me so long.

Collapse
 
steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

A cheatsheet to use VI editor to program in shell scripts.