19 Absolute Simple Things About Linux Terminal Every Ubuntu User Should Know

Its FOSS ^ | 5 December 2021 | Abhishek Prakash

[ShadowAce]

[frogjerk]

Very good primer!

[Steely Tom]

I can also get along without electricity too. And refrigeration.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Pollard]

I knew most of those.

[wally_bert]

I knew some at different times.

[Paladin2]

The terminal is only extremely useful because of The ‘Net and
Search Engines...[along with cut and paste and editing capabilities].

Jus’ sayin’...

[Pollard]

I use Yakuake terminal. It runs all the time and when you hit F12 and it pops down from the top of the screen. I’ve got it set to be 60% of the screen width and centered horizontally. I don’t have to wonder where the terminal will open or how small it will be.

[Fellow Traveler]

For later

[ThunderSleeps]

I would just nit-pick (because I'm avoiding doing something else at the moment) that for #16 that isn't really running multiple commands "at once." It is running multiple commands in sequence from one command line entry.

Now, you can run multiple things at once by putting a running command into the background. I'm a bash guy so this is what I know:

./some_command &
./some_other_command

This will start some_command and immediately return control to the shell, where you can start some_other_command and both will run simultaneously.

A couple of other really handy tricks involves piping. Say the some_command program was going to dump a lot of text to the screen. It's going to scroll by fast...or you can pipe that into one of two programs, more or less. Yes, that is their names.

./some_command | more

The vertical bar is the pipe symbol. All the standard output from some_command gets piped into the input of the more program - which shows you a few lines at a time and allows you to page through it at your own pace. Less works similarly, no I really haven't bothered to find out why we have two nearly identical utilities.

There are also 'head' and 'tail' programs similar to more and less that, as the names imply, show you merely the head (first few lines) or tail (last few lines) of the text.

One other good trick is redirecting to a file. Suppose some_command generates a lot of text and you want to save it to look at later:

./some_command > foo.txt

Will dump the standard output of some_command into a file called foo.txt. Or you can get fancy and do:

./some_command > foo.txt
./some_other_command >> foo.txt

This puts the output of some_command into foo.txt, then it appends the output of some_other_command to foo.txt - so you can later read it all.

Ok, enough geeking out for one afternoon.

[Pollard]

My desktop

My full screen menu

Hardly primitive and I rarely use the terminal. I can do an update faster via the terminal than opening up the GUI program for it. Hit F12 to open my terminal and type sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade

I do have one program that is command line only.

It's a video downloader that will download from youtube plus hundreds of other websites.

cd Videos takes me to my video folder and youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNcpAQPpIOE will download the best quality version of that video.

youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNcpAQPpIOE will list all the video only, audio only and video + audio formats available and give me 2-3 digit numeric codes for them.

youtube-dl -f 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNcpAQPpIOE is that same highest quality as not using the argument.

Works on most any website or webpage with a video on it. All the browser addons for that are bloated and/or make you sign up to get the best quality versions.

[ShadowAce]

I use Yakuake terminal.

I've heard of it, but have never used it.

My favorite is Terminator. I have a few layouts set up so I can click on an icon, and it will open a window separated into multiple panes and each pane will automatically log into a cluster node on a couple of different HPCs at work. One click, and I'm logged into about 20 different servers.

Pretty cool.

[ShadowAce]

I love youtube-dl.

[Tallguy]

I struggle with terminal at times. Even so, I see its value and I actually prefer it for basic tasks like installing new software.

[Pollard]

For a while, it wasn’t working for bitchute so someone created bitchute-dl which you can find on github. I think youtube-dl is working with bitchute again though. Little hard to use it on rumble but I did figure it out but don’t remember exactly what I had to do so I’d have to figure it out again. Might have used one of the Embed urls.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Why does the title say “every Ubuntu user should know”?

Is this a way if saying “every n00b should know”?

Because AFAICT none of this is unique to Ubuntu.

[ShadowAce]

I know. I use these all on Red Hat as well.

I'm guessing here, but I think the author only knows Ubuntu and thinks all other consumer-level users only use it.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Exactly.

[Openurmind]

Oh man... Another “Too techy for you” Linux post. My friend... Are you trying to discourage the use of Linux when there are now full point and click GUI desktops?

Here is a counter argument to terminal “Dependency”...

Aside from the totally capable GUI interfaces most distros have now, I am running into very useful apps but they have no GUI Icon launch access supplied, only terminal commands to start them. Found that it is easy to create a launch shortcut and icon that will automatically perform the launch command for you without needing to put the commands in the terminal. I am going to use Cinnamon as the example but in the link below are the instructions how to do it with other desktops.

For Cinnamon, Xfce, And LXDE, first find and make note of where the launch file for the application is located in your directory. You can find this with a search of your directory using the application name. Or it can usually be found in system files/user/bin/. Or just use the terminal launch command supplied with the app if you have it.

You can then create an application launcher by right-clicking on the desktop background, and selecting +Create Launcher menu. Click on the Create Short cut icon and it will give you a menu of icon types to choose from. Then fill in the app type, app name, terminal command, the location of the app in your file directory using the “Browse” dropdown menu, and then any additional note you want as meta data when you hover your mouse cursor over the icon.