Learning the Command Line

20 years of coding on an IBM mainframe, I rarely and I mean rarely ever had reason to venture away from TSO and enter an actual command in a terminal.

When we finally got desktop computers, the files or folders I created I would do by right clicking on a folder and create new.   What the heck is this command line and why oh why would I ever use it?

As I moved away from the mainframe into this brave new world, I learned new terms such as pwd, grep, echo, mkdir and sudo(Danger, danger, Will Robinson) and being able to safely navigate the command line is a must for a software developer.

I wrote a program where I can post an update to Twitter from the command line!  Tweeting from the command line.  What else could possibly be more fulfilling?  I was so proud of that little program.  I was now a command line ninja!  How proud my parents must be.

There is a wealth of learning material available on the web to help one develop master of the command line.

I am going through the CLI crash course Zed Shaw for the 3rd time.

Quick left has published a series of posts to help you get your command line ninja on.