[Sussex] linux command line

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 14:46 +0000, John D. wrote:
> One thing that has crossed my mind was how easy it might be to have like
> a cross between a dictionary and thesaurus for linux commands, but
> possibly laid out in a "how do I do.........." (a la mandrake), task
> orientated?
> 
> Oh and it would have to be written in a "plain english" as opposed to
> the formatted and technical language of man pages and TLDP howto's etc
> etc.

If you get a chance take a look at O'Reilly's "Linux Server Hacks" -
probably more server task orientated than you might like, but it pretty
much follows the model you're talking about. 

There are plenty of these style of books (often they're called
"Cookbooks" because they give you recipes for performing a complex
task).

Unfortunately most linux distros have their own specialised command line
tools (emerge and etc-update on Gentoo for example) so no guide will
ever be complete.  They key thing is to learn what each program does and
then get a handle of what you can do by redirecting the output of a
command (I'm sure you've already discovered the power of pipes).


-- 
Geoffrey Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology