Linux users...help?

[Kanrya]

I've been taking courses at ITT tech since March of last year. I recently started up a Linux course and the book is confusing as fuck. The teacher is a fellow whovian that is pretty cool in explaining it in terms i can understand, however he has been sick during this past week and I'm up shit creek without a paddle on minimum sleep due to a particular roommate issue. If you understand Linux and are willing to help me with any of my questions PLEASE. My head is spinning and I want off the tilt-a-whirl.

[Psi]

Add my AIM or Yahoo if you want.  Or ask some questions here.

I know enough to install a couple of distros,  add some packages, and some basic terminal stuff.

Most of terminal knowledge is based on using OS X which has the same shell, although not every command is the same.

Am working fairly hard at work ATM, but may  have some time to answer questions.  But I do sleep about 2 hours from now so may not be in when right time zone

edit.  Seems this app auto fills thread titles...

[Kanrya]

The course im taking is in Linux Networking, and i have to list things using wildcards to express filenames with as few characters as possible. Than on another instance it asks me to give an example of grep and where to use said example. What I'm asking is if you could tell me exactly to go to figure out linux commands on how to do these things I could pretty much do it. Not many people use this OS and my teacher claims that its very easy. I however have grown up using Windows as an OS so its more confusing than anything. Thank you very much Psi. I do appreciate you helping on this.

[stormwyrm]

Well, I've been using Linux as my primary OS for close to 20 years (and I used to do Solaris and IRIX before that), so I'm a bit of an old hand, and I write and maintain Linux software for a living. Feel free to send me a PM if you like and I'll do what I can to help.

As for wildcards, all you need to do is remember that they're patterns. The ? is the basic wildcard, and it operates just like a wildcard in poker: it will match any character in the filename, e.g.:

ls ?xyz

will list files that start with any character, and end with xyz. So axyz will match, as will bxyz, but not vwxyz (as that would now have two characters followed by xyz).

The other wildcard is *, and it will match zero or more arbitrary characters. So if you have:

ls abc*xyz

That will match all filenames that have zero or more characters between abc and xyz. So it will match abcdxyz abcdefxyz, even abcxyz, but not aabcxyz or abcdxyza.

There are also character class wildcards, which basically list characters that are permitted to match. For example:

ls *.[ch]

will list all files that end in .c or .h. You could even do ranges:

ls *.[a-z]

which will list all files that end in a dot and any lower-case letter, e.g. abc.a, 1234.z, but not xyz or 1234.5.

If you're old enough to have ever used MS-DOS (or tried to use the cmd shell on Windows), it uses pretty much the same wildcards, although Unix/Linux shell wildcards are much more general. The character class wildcards are not supported on Windows and the * wildcard is much more general on Linux than on DOS/Windows, but using the command line on Windows may give you a general sense of things.

Grep is used to find patterns of strings within files. You basically give it a string pattern and a bunch of files to look through, and it will list the lines inside the file where the pattern was found. The simplest pattern is just a plain string, so grep abc myfile will find all the lines in myfile that contain the string abc.

Hope this helps.

[Kanrya]

it does so much! Thank you!

[Oniya]

I'm not a Linux user, but there are a number of command reference pages out there.  I know it's no substitute for an actual person, but they could be useful for making flash cards, or just reminding yourself of how they are formatted.