Fish: A Shell for N00bs
One of the hardest things I have to tell people when I try to win them to linux is “you are going to need to do some things on the command line”. That about instantly shuts them off. I, personally, love the command line. My home server doesn’t even have a screen, I manage everything through ssh (a remote command line terminal session ). Now for those of you who want to try out linux, once you have installed ubuntu (the best linux to learn on), you will inevitably read online about typing in some kind of command in the shell. When you actually go to the shell, you will be greeted with:
jkorz@lappy486:~$
That’s enough to make most people confused.
You need to get FISH (Friendly Interactive SHell). On ubuntu, you can get it by typing:
sudo apt-get install fish
Now life is good. When you type something and press tab, you get a list of programs that match plus what they are for.
jkorz@lappy486: ~> gr {tab}
grep (Print lines matching a pattern)
groff (Front-end for the groff document formatting system)
grog (Guess options for groff command)
grops (PostScript driver for groff)
grotty (Groff driver for typewriter-like devices)
groupadd (Create a new group)
groupdel (Delete a group)
groupmod (Modify a group definition on the system)
groups (Print the groups a user is in)
grpck (Verify integrity of group files)
grpconv (Convert to and from shadow passwords and groups)
grpunconv (Convert to and from shadow passwords and groups)
jkorz@lappy486: ~> gr
Fish can do lots more, but why bother covering it myself when you can read more here or here.