On 29-May-08 19:25:16, Bev Nicolso'll get a usefuon wrote:

Still on the nursery slopes as far as bash commands I'm afraid but have, once again, realised how very useful they can be. How do you learn what to type in in any given situation, though? (I'm asking generally, not for any specific problem I have now.) Bev. (Ubuntu user.)

Bash is quite a complex thing (as indeed are even the simpler shell languages), though most usage will be fairly basic.

And 'man bash', while useful for looking up something you know you're wanting to use, isn't all that helpful for suggesting what to do to perform a given type of task.

While I'm at it, though, if you type the bash command 'help' on the command-line, you'll get a useful summary of what's available. Then typing 'help <keyword>' for any of the keywords that come up will give a detailed breakdown of its usage.

E.g. try

help help alias

However, it looks as though you might need a "bash tutorial" so enter that into Google (including quotation marks) and you'll get several helpful-looking results.

I thought that the one at

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html

looked pretty good for the day-to-day stuff; and it has a big brother at

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

for more advanced stuff.

Hoping this helps! Ted.

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