Save yourself some trouble and read a good book on the Bash shell or take an online tutorial or two. Some things that helped me initially were the Bash Guides & docs at http://TLDP.org and the RUTE tutorial, if it is still around. - http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-downloadable-books-to-teach-yourself-linux/
The 'help' command will provide you with information on Bash built-in commands, but it can be hard to read & there are some better online references for Bash help. The problem with many of the man pages is they have few good real world examples, compare 'man chmod' to 'man find' or to 'man rsync' to see what I mean. Like Tim suggested use the "command --help" option to find common switches to features you may need. The 'apropos' command or 'man -k' alias can be a wonderful & often forgotten resource. The 'which' command will find commands that are already configured in your PATH environment. These don't always find the commands to launch gui apps, but most of the command line apps are referenced. For gui apps, I often use something like 'locate system-config | grep bin' to find redhat sysadmin tools, if I cant remember the exact name of the binary, usually I can find part of it with locate or search with grep & google. When launching gui apps from a terminal, remember to put the command in the background by ending it with the '&' character. This will get your terminal prompt back to do other command-line magic or else you'll kill the app when you close the terminal. # man -k browser # which firefox /usr/bin/firefox.exe # /usr/bin/firefox.exe --help # /usr/bin/firefox.exe -safe-mode http://weather.gov/jax & -Hope this helps, Art On 4/23/2012 7:10 PM, Tim Holloway wrote: > You SHOULD be root if you open synaptic. synaptic opens a secure > database in order to maintain the software inventory. Plus, it > frequently installs programs and files to secured parts of the OS. > > On the other hand, if you have to be root to see your home directory, > the owner and/or access rights are wrong on that directory. > > The reason for avoiding root is that root can do virtually anything. You > don't have to look any farther than Microsoft Windows to get an idea of > what "anything" can mean. Most people will log in as an ordinary user > and use the "sudo" command to elevate their privileges temporarily. > There's also a "su" command that can change the effective userID for a > given command shell, but that's usually discouraged in favor of the > safer "sudo". > > There is no universal command line guide, but many Linux commands can > give a synopsis of their options if you run them using option "-h" > and/or "--help". > > For more detailed assistance, the grand old standard is the "man" > command which outputs a short manual page. Use the command "man man" to > get more information. Going up from there is the "info" command, which > is man with hypertext, so to speak. Finally, a lot of the GUI programs > have GUI help with a command-line topic. > > There are thousands of commands that you can run off a command prompt, > but, unfortunately no universal standard. Some are very well documented, > some not at all, in which case, it's Google Time. > > Tim > > On Sun, 2012-04-22 at 13:33 -0400, brett michaels wrote: >> Is there any link to a list of commands that tell one how to do things like >> open a program such as the browser or use the media player to play a video? >> This GUI business is a road to nowhere. My limited skills will never get >> any better if I keep using it. >> One other thing. People have said that one should never stay logged in as >> root, but why? >> This version of Mint 12(that's what they call it on the startup screen) >> makes you login as root if you even so much as open Synaptic, so what >> difference does it make? >> It offers two kinds of accounts,"Administrator" and,"Standard", but >> "Standard is so restrictive so that it does not even allow you to open your >> home folder. >> Btw, Ralph gave a very enjoyable presentation. >> Thanks, >> Hugh > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 > RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml > Unsubscribe [email protected] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
