The Man Page Minute Lives!

So, I’ve struck a deal with the Fresh Ubuntu podcast that will essentially be carrying my (as-yet-failed-to-launch) podcast, the Man Page Minute as one of their show’s regular segments. My plan for the podcast was to cover command line basics, specifically on Linux and related platforms so that beginners could learn the power of the command line. This stemmed from a segment that we briefly did on the MacNu podcast last year, but it never really went anywhere.
Here’s a (very) brief outline of the first segment which I’ll be recording shortly, and should appear sometime in an August episode:

  • Why use the command line?
    • failsafe administration (X won’t load, headless system)
    • faster for many tasks (deleting multiple files)
    • powerful (regexps, process manipulation)
    • faster for remote administration (ssh)
  • How to access the shell
    • Applications | Accessories | Terminal
    • ssh to your machine
  • Command of the week: ls
    ?????? -a, –all??? do not ignore entries starting with .? In other words, show hidden “dot files.”
    -A, –almost-all – Doesn’t show . and .. (the parent and current directories)
    -l???? use a long listing format
    -h, –human-readable
    with -l, print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
    -m???? fill width with a comma separated list of entries
    -r, –reverse
    reverse order while sorting
    -R, –recursive
    list subdirectories recursively
    -s, –size
    with -l, print size of each file, in blocks
    -S???? sort by file size
    -t???? sort by modification time
    -1???? list one file per line
    -x???? list entries by lines instead of by columns
    -X???? sort alphabetically by entry extension

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