I’m a Windows user of all life. But I love Linux. And these last two years after so many time I started learning it in deep . But one thing is bugging me is that I am those persons that has bad times remembering names, words… imagine commands… Even after using it so much I remember some basics but I’m struggling a lot and I have to go back to notes constantly to do some basic operations. Even worst after trying multiple distro from from different upstreams that commands are … Different. What would be your recommendations to help me. Are there tools to help this issue ? My guess is that A LOT of people happens the same. And it’s one of the reasons Linux has such a slow adption . Because is excellent and full of capabilities.
Ok but what if my Wi-Fi isn’t working
use your phone to look up the commands on how to get internet working again
alternatively, connect computer to your router via cable
You can download StackOverflow, Wikipedia, etc very conveniently, cf https://kiwix.org/
I have a local copy that I bring on travels with me and I keep it relatively up to date. Very convenient thanks to having a single file per source and tools to read it (Web server, GUI, etc).
Then use the commands help or read the local man document. In example for grep it would be
grep --help
andman grep
. You don’t need an online connection for this.Containers become problematic, some don’t have man pages or other common commands installed. Debugging applications on them requires a wide knowledge of all sorts of primitive commands and workarounds to achieve common tasks. My biggest fear is a container without grep.
How do I remember what the command even is? Like how would I discover the grep tool without using the Internet?
Discovering tools is not what the question and solution presented here was. But for that question, I recommend downloading a book about Linux as a reference or something like that. Or a basic tutorial series to read and remember basics about Linux.
You can also just list the
ls /usr/bin
directory to see what programs are there.There is actually a command to search the man pages for terms, to list the commands:
apropos
$ apropos -s 1 search apropos (1) - search the manual page names and descriptions find (1) - search for files in a directory hierarchy flatpak-search (1) - Search for applications and runtimes gamemodelist (1) - search for processes running with gamemode rg (1) - recursively search the current directory for lines matching a pattern zipgrep (1) - search files in a ZIP archive for lines matching a pattern
Note: I cut some parts out in the output to make it shorter. The option
-s 1
means, it will list man pages from section 1 only.