Re: installing things

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How do you remember all those lengthy commands?

I find that, for myself, you learn the basic family of commands (the root command name) and what it does. I usually have a handful of common parameters memorized, such as "-r" or "-R" meaning "recurse into subdirectories" or "--verbose" for extra output. Once I knew what the basic commands did, I tend to dig in the man-pages for the given command to see exactly what I want to do. Those "lengthy commands" simply become a chaining together of more simple commands you already know.

An example might be learning the following list of commands (and building the list as you find need)

ls:  lists files
grep:  searches for patterns in a file
sed/awk:  edits files via a script
less/more:  pages output
find:  finds files matching conditions
sort:  sorts files
uniq:  performs "uniqueness" related tasks
tr:  change one set of characters into another set of chars
pwd:  print the current directory


Once you understand what they're supposed to do, you can start to chain them together to produce more complex results. You can also explore their man-pages when you think a particular command might be able to do something related to what you already know. For example, the "grep" command finds (and prints) lines that match a given pattern. This might lead you to wonder if there's an option to make it print lines that *don't* match a given pattern. Indeed, grep takes a "-v" parameter to inVert the printing so that it only prints lines that *don't* match the given pattern.

Some commands, however, I find myself helpless and constantly referring to the manual EVERY SINGLE TIME (which, isn't all that often). Burning a CD, transcoding audio/video or manipulating images with ImageMagick require that I spend some time with their man pages (or their help output).

can you copy them all to a clipboard like thing and run them
in sequence?

yes, depending on your environment, you can copy/paste commands into the command-line. The "how" of it varies depending on what controls the clipboard. In "screen", you can use control+A followed by "]" to mark some screen stuff to keep, and then use control+A followed by "[" to paste the contents you snagged. In a terminal emulator (whether a telnet/ssh/xterm/rxvt whatever) session, the clipboard is controlled by the owning application (windows or X), and any associated copy/paste commands should work there, with "paste" acting as if you typed the command.

Copy & paste work well for beginners, but as you advance, it's troublesome and prevents you from learning how to construct your own solutions to things.

Just my own learning path,

-tim





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