Command Line Confidence
The terminal is a small language with an unfriendly manual. This short course teaches the twenty commands worth memorising, how to compose them with pipes, and how to write the little scripts that remove your most boring chore.
The route
- 15 minMoving and looking
cd, ls and find, and a mental model of a path that survives a strange machine.
You board here - 15 minPipes, and doing one thing well
grep, sort, uniq, wc and cut, composed into actual answers.
- 15 minEditing streams without fear
sed and awk, at the level you will genuinely use them.
- 10 minTurning a chore into a script
Shebangs, arguments, exit codes, and getting it onto your PATH.
A look at the teaching
Which files are the biggest, and who keeps adding to them?
# Ten largest files under src, biggest last.
find src -type f -printf '%s\t%p\n' | sort -n | tail -10 | cut -f2
# Which files change most often? Same shape of question,
# so very nearly the same pipeline.
git log --name-only --pretty=format: -- src \
| grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
Every command here does one thing and hands text to the next. The skill is not memorising flags — it is noticing that “biggest files” and “most-changed files” are the same question twice.
Who is driving
Dávid teaches the way a good colleague explains things at a whiteboard — no jargon for its own sake, and nothing hidden behind “as you can see”.
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