[Gllug] Console Tools (was Re: Can't get my CNet PRO200WL netcard to work in Gentoo)

[Wulf Forrester-Barker]

Simon <sms at lateral.net> commented:

> emacs (some would say vi) Most config files are in plain ascii,
> so becoming familiar with a decent text editor will save you a
> lot of time. Ideally, learn how to use both without too much
> trouble, and then settle on the one that you prefer. If you
> head down the vi route, take a good long look at vim.

Vim gets my vote - although, to be fair, I've never seriously
looked at emacs. As I recall, I got the impression that vi was
pretty universally available on Unix type command lines and so
decided to direct my learning down that route. I use vim on a day
to day basis, but feel confident that I could get by if stuck at
an unfamilar machine with vi. In fact, the first text editor I
played around with on Linux was pico; that was relatively basic,
although still better than Windows Notepad ;-)... I'd concur with
Simon that learning how to use a decent text editor is a very
worthwhile investment of your time.

Other tools I'd suggest looking at are cat, head and tail (for
taking a look at text files without changing anything), less (for
paging through longer texts) and grep (for highlighting specific
sections of the file - or searching for a piece of text across a
whole bunch of files). Most Linux books will cover those in some
detail - you can also find out more about them with the man or
info commands (type 'man man' or 'info info' to get these
programs to explain themselves - you can escape by pressing the q
key).

However, in my opinion, the most excellent thing about the
command line of Unix type software is how you can pipe the
results of one command into another. Eg.

ls -lh | grep '^d' | less

will give you a list of all subdirectories in the current
directory (ls -lh gives a long format list with sizes in 'human
readable' form, grep '^d' picks out all lines beginning with 'd',
and less makes it easy to page the display up and down using the
f(orward) and b(ack) keys). That's a trivial example, but if you
can get the hang of piping information around, you'll go a long
way ;-)

Wulf


Cheers,

Simon

-- 
A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the
conditions
that make it fail.
		-- Jerry Ogdin


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