genericmaillists posted on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:53:50 -0500 as excerpted:
> pwd on cli will show you what directory you are in... Present Working
> Directory. explain what you are talking about with PWD and $HOME
$PWD is the shell variable often containing the same directory that would
be output by the pwd command. $HOME is the shell variable normally
containing a user's home directory -- another way to denote that is ~/ .
FWIW... One of the best moves I ever made was when I got serious about
Linux, and decided that if I were to actually get anywhere useful with it
(I'd had linux as a dual-boot for some time, but I just don't like
rebooting, and I didn't know what I was doing, so it mostly just sat
there), I'd need to get serious about Linux documentation.
So I asked on my ISP's newsgroup, that ISP at the time having a rather
high concentration of *ix users, if anyone had recommendations for good
Linux books, several hundred pages thick, that could serve as a good
orientation. Years before, Using DOS 6 had done that for DOS for me, but
since then, I had tried many other books with far less success, so I
decided to use the wisdom of the net to find a solution that would
actually be worth the money I was paying for it.
Of the recommendations, two books stood out as recommended by multiple
people. I bought them both. As it happens, they're both published by
O'Reilly Publishing. The first book, Running Linux, was in its third
edition then and is now in at least its fifth. It's arranged much like a
textbook or tutorial might be, with easy stuff at the front, more complex
stuff building on it toward the back. That really got me going in Linux.
The second book was Linux in a Nutshell, which is also known as "The
Arabian", for the illustration on the front. (Such illustrations are an
O'Reilly theme, very nearly all their tech books have a similar
illustration of some animal or other.) Again, it was in its third
printing then, and is in its sixth now. I know because I just bought my
fthird copy of it! They wear out after a few years! This book is much
more a reference book. A blurb on one edition a few years ago described
it something like this. "More useful than a stack of printed manpages,
and MUCH more portable." That's a reasonably accurate description of the
majority of the book, but they've taken care to make the command
descriptions much more accessible to the ordinary user than many manpages
are. IOW, it's not simply copying the manpages, but "translating" them
into "English". There's somewhat more detailed appendixes on the more
complex topics, bash scripting, regular expressions, sed, gawk, etc.
Really, the part that gets the most use here and the reason I keep it
within arm's length from the computer is the bash section, which I have
bookmarked, with the bookmark on the page covering the "test" command,
the quicker to look it up when I'm shell scripting something or other.
Both books are very good in that they're reasonably distribution neutral,
sticking for the most part to the command line, and commands available in
all or most distributions. Of course, stuff like package managers, etc,
is an exception to that, but they cover rpm and yum, as well as debian.
One of the reasons I upgraded to the new version a couple weeks ago,
however (ther than the old one being all ragged, with a missing back
cover, from use...), was the newer coverage on git and a couple other
things.
A Linux or just CLI (command line interface) newbie could do far worse
than getting and reading these books. I figure it saved me at least 3
months workth of full time equivilent (so 40 hours/wk for three months)
screwing around, trying to figure things out on my own. At even minimum
wage, how much would /that/ be worth? Yet if you check online or buy
them at Fry's Electronics as I did, you can get them at a reasonable
discount off of suggested retail. I think I paid ~$70 for the two of
them back in 2001, and the 900-ish page Linux in a Nutshell I just bought
still has the sticker on it -- $32.98 Fry's price, $49.99 suggested
retail.
(No, I do /not/ work for them or something! I'm just an incredibly
satisfied user -- obviously, if I just both my third copy of the one
book, but the other is more valuable for a beginner, less so for an
experienced user and personal systems sysadmin.)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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