PLAYterm: a New Way To Improve Command Line Skills

chrb writes "Linux Journal points out PLAYterm, an interesting project that offers up recordings of Linux command line sessions, with the aim of helping viewers to improve their skills by watching gurus at work." And there's no bad excuse to link to Neal Stephenson's excellent (and free-to-download in delicious zipped-text form) In the Beginning was the Command Line.

"guru" unix command line users - watch and learn?

[ardiri]

guru "unix" command line users know pretty much exactly what they are doing and mostly escape extend their commands and type like there is no tomorrow - you would have to play back these videos in slow motion to really learn from them, command typed, enter pressed, pages of stdout scroll by. nice reference point for learners. the only way to truly learn unix commands and get comfortable with command line tools is to avoid the UI completely. try doing stuff from your tty terminals and disable x11 :) learn to do word processing with latex, telnet into your routers to configure them. if your not up for doing that, forget about using the command line tools. back in the early 90's, we couldn't afford RAM to even start x11 :) i personally use cygwin on windows and terminal on macosx for as much as i can.. never know when you need those command line skills again

Watching Gurus?

[thegarbz]

Either the the supposed "gurus" are actually people who have done nothing more than read the idiots guide to the command line, or we aren't watching them work. Somehow I don't think gurus type out an explanation of what they are doing mid work, somehow I don't think gurus type quite so slowly. Having had a look at these videos they aren't about becoming better at the commandline. They look very basic and require no prior knowledge.

Not that theirs anything wrong with the project, the summary and title are just a load of crap.

I'm actually not quite sure who they are targeting. On the one side they describe how "ls" works, and on the other there's no mention of the tab key, man pages or any of the other really useful things that show what's currently going on and how to get ahead in your terminal session.

Re:CLI fetish

[martin-boundary]

bash is a lot more powerful than python or perl, for small and medium complexity tasks. It is certainly better at interactive uses, and it is much better at piping than either of those languages.

Use python or perl for complex tasks by all means, but they are a poor substitute for what the shell is good for.