[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
“…cases where your only friend is that $ prompt, which you
can su into a #. You will, sooner or later, face it yourself. The
time to prepare for that day is now. A broken system does not
present the ideal milieu for exploring the joys of new
applications. And, as in the foggy distant past when Windows 3.0
got released and, once the user learned to tip-toe around UAEs, DOS
skills disappeared, the increasingly elaborate new graphical
desktops for Linux impart complacency insofar as fundamental Linux
skills are concerned.”
“Linux lets you do very nearly everything from a simple command
prompt, if you know the right commands. I don’t know them all. Do
you? Did you know that the chmod command recurses directories if
you apply the -R option, while other commands do the same thing if
you apply the -r option? And if you do, do you use these commands
with sufficient frequency that you will remember them in the pinch?
Me neither. Man pages are often helpful, but they are also
sometimes a little obscure, which shortcoming is magnified when the
person reading them is in high panic.”
“Most everyone has a favorite terminal application. … But here
we’ll deal only with the tools necessary to fix what’s broken, that
which keeps you out of those nice, easy-to-use X apps, the programs
that ought to be on every system. Some of them have equivalents
that aren’t mentioned, and if you’re comfortable with one of those,
fine. These are the ones that work for me.”