Are there any games which can train people to learn terminal commands?

Question

It seems to me learning how to use the terminal is a prerequisite to learning how to use Ubuntu. So I'm trying to figure out the best way to learn. Is there a Quizlet online flash card set out there? A better way?

score 129 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 03 '14 at 17:07

You can add the following line (command) at the end of your ~/.bashrc file:

echo "Did you know that:"; whatis $(ls /bin | shuf -n 1)

Every time you open the terminal you will learn something about a random command.

If you want some fun, you can use cowsay "utility". To install it, run this in terminal:

sudo apt-get install cowsay

Then add the following line at the end of your ~/.bashrc file:

cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1) $(whatis $(ls /bin) 2>/dev/null | shuf -n 1)

Or you can add the above line as alias in ~/.bash_aliases. I added:

alias ?='cowsay -f $(ls /usr/share/cowsay/cows | shuf -n 1 | cut -d. -f1) $(whatis $(ls /bin) 2>/dev/null | shuf -n 1)'

Whenever you get bored, you can type in terminal: ? (followed by Enter). It's like playing dice by yourself.

enter image description here

score 37 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

I used to play with whatis. It's not exactly a game, but it's a relatively easy way to learn.

For example, type whatis sudo apt-get update and it returns:

enter image description here

Before I execute any command, I hit it with whatis first. I learn what I'm going to do, then I will do the command with confidence.

If whatis doesn't provide much information or if it's unclear to me, I will go to and read the man.

For example, man sudo.

Google gives you so much info here, sources inside Ask Ubuntu and outside. Here, LMGTFY: best way to learn terminal commands on Ubuntu

snim2 · Answer 3 · 2014-01-03T17:17:13.503

27

Yes, Terminus is once such game that will help. There is a live version here, and the code is on github. It's a neat idea, although I rather wish the code was more easily extensible.

edited Jan 03 '14 at 17:17

answered Aug 26 '13 at 15:50

snim2

430

azz · Answer 4 · 2013-08-26T15:40:12.780

I do not know of any games, however there are some useful command line utilities that help.

What does a command do?

whatis command
# example:
$ whatis cut
cut (1)              - remove sections from each line of files

How do I?

man -k keyword
# example:
$ man -k "remove empty"
rmdir (1)            - remove empty directories

Alternatively:

apropos keyword  
# defaults to printing every result with at least one of the keywords supplied
#   use --and to only print results matching multiple keywords.
$ apropos zip --and extract
funzip (1)           - filter for extracting from a ZIP archive in a pipe
unzip (1)            - list, test and extract compressed files in a ZIP archive
unzipsfx (1)         - self-extracting stub for prepending to ZIP archives
uz (1)               - gunzips and extracts a gzip'd tar'd archive

How do I use?

man command
# example:
man tar
# use '?' key to search, and 'q' to quit.

Or, some utilities support a help option, such as:

$ umount --help
Usage: umount -h | -V
   umount -a [-d] [-f] [-r] [-n] [-v] [-t vfstypes] [-O opts]
   umount [-d] [-f] [-r] [-n] [-v] special | node...

These may be in the form of command -h, command --help, command -?.

For information:

info command
# example:
$ info cat
# shows an information page

If you have something specific you need to accomplish, Google is your friend. Otherwise there are many books, such as the Bash book from O'Rielly.

score 14 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 26 '13 at 10:57

14

Take a look at command line fu

You can browse some cool command line snippets, and if you want deeper understanding you can read the manuals of the commands they use.

answered Aug 26 '13 at 10:57

Iftah

241

score 13 · Answer 6 · edited Aug 26 '13 at 13:00

Ubuntu was designed to be very user friendly. Learning how to use the terminal is not a prerequisite to learning how to use Ubuntu. It is, however, if you want to become a power user or troubleshoot problems yourself.

To answer your question, I don't know of any games designed to help or teach shell commands, but I would highly recommend the following resources bash and system administration related:

UNIX Tutorial for Beginners

Please note that this tutorial uses Red Hat (another Linux distribution) and references some directories that only apply to students of the University of Surrey.

BASH Programming - Introduction HOW-TO

Hosted at The Linux Documentation Project (http://www.tldp.org/), author Mike G

Bash Shell Scripting

A wikibook from Wikipedia

http://www.nongnu.org/lpi-manuals/manual/ Study manuals fro the Linux Professional Institute (LPI)
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html

GNU Bash Reference Manual

http://linux.die.net/abs-guide/

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (http://linux.die.net/), author Mendel Cooper

11684 · Answer 7 · 2013-11-20T14:06:50.083

8

You've got tons of games on http://overthewire.org. The easiest is Bandit, "aimed for absolute beginners".

edited Nov 20 '13 at 14:06

answered Aug 27 '13 at 12:25

11684

181

score 5 · Answer 8 · answered Aug 26 '13 at 21:28

5

There is a game for learning the VIM commands at http://vim-adventures.com/ which I recommend. I get my apprentices to play it on their first day :-)

answered Aug 26 '13 at 21:28

Dogsbody

209

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 12:50

2

The Memrise Tool has a unix and linux command line section. It's a great tool for learning anything in a punch card manner.

answered Aug 27 '13 at 12:50

deworde

121

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered Aug 26 '13 at 15:29

The Linux Documentation Project is having the best and updating sources for learning BASH.

Ubuntu Community have collected all the good links which are very much helpful to learn BASH

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CommandLineResources

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 05:54

1

There is the game Uplink. It's been quite fun and threre are pretty good similarities to a linux shell. But it's got its own commands as well.

answered Aug 27 '13 at 05:54

Samoth

111

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Aug 26 '13 at 06:35

In the early UNIX days (v6 and v7) (yes before Linux), there was a series of very simplistic tutorials under the command called learn. I must admit, I started my training there .. it had tutorials on command line, vi, and a little bit of C programming. It has long since disappeared. And of course, this was before the proliferation of books on this subject, the high amount of easy internet connectivity, basically all you had was basically the man pages.

So now it is quite easy, basically go to Google, either find some documentation posted. Or use amazon to find an appropriate book. Amazon even has ratings and reviews on their books.

score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Aug 26 '13 at 09:53

Well, most of the basics I learned when Linux was still mostly command-line based and SUSE was one of the few Linux with GUI-based installation. I played around with Gentoo these times...just install your system with some tools like pm-sensors and stuff, soon you're back in the terminal for some configuration

I don't know if there is still a distro that is installed via command-line, as I stopped working with Linux till a month ago, when I found out they finally made the step to getting GUI-based and interesting for Users, great thanks to all programmers out there, that made a lot of my old PCs useful again!!!

Stupid MS simply IS too stupid for maintaining their best product any longer...Windows XP...a company that does that, surely is not considering to get an OS fully stable and safe...and in case of Win 7 they may got it very stable and secure, but it takes way to much resources to do so.

Really love the Linux way off controlling hardware without huge compilers or interpreters or other stuff in the way, like on Windows.

But if you want learn more about Linux, Gentoo is a great way of building up your own system, step by step and also learn how Linux works. Gentoo also is able to run on nearly everything, no matter how small the hardware resources, so you can take a other, older PC for these Linux, install-test, fun times!

score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 03:46

0

Not exactly a game, but there is this site, where you can learn several different commands.

answered Aug 27 '13 at 03:46

thiagowfx

865

Himanshu · Answer 15 · 2013-08-27T08:41:11.840

0

Not a game but take a look at http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/kwc-unix-for-poets.pdf

It covers sed, awk and grep besides others and shows you how to count, sort, compute ngrams etc. It has exercises and all. I've referred to it again and again.

edited Aug 27 '13 at 08:41

answered Aug 27 '13 at 08:35

Himanshu

101

score 0 · Answer 16 · answered Aug 28 '13 at 09:39

0

Not a game, but comes handy when you want to learn some command and no linux is available: rextester

answered Aug 28 '13 at 09:39

ren

101

score 0 · Answer 17 · answered Aug 28 '13 at 19:50

The matrix for game cube is where I learned quite(relative to my 13 year old prior knowledge) a bit about the UNIX terminal. There was a mini-game where you'd "hack" your way into the matrix to drop guns off for pickup later when you are playing that level. Actually bar far one of my favorite features of any game ever.

score 0 · Answer 18 · answered Sep 07 '13 at 15:00

0

inx (is not X) can be used as live cd and teaches terminal stuff in a fun and interactive way

answered Sep 07 '13 at 15:00

catch22

55

score 0 · Answer 19 · answered Jan 31 '14 at 17:14

0

I guess bandit is one of the best to learn and understand more about Linux commands and knowing more about linux for beginners. You can get the link from here

answered Jan 31 '14 at 17:14

Vishnu N K

615

Are there any games which can train people to learn terminal commands?

19 Answers19

Linked