Linux Command Line
Linux Command Line Overview
In this episode, Daniel and Don take a look how to use a Linux terminal to gain access to the command line. They demonstrate Gnome terminal, Xterm, Konsole and several other terminals and walk through their configruation and use.
0h 35m
Welcome to ITProTV.
I'm your host, Don Pezet [CROSSTALK]
[MUSIC]
You're watching ITProTV.
All right, greetings everyone and
welcome to another great
episode of ITProTV.
I'm your host Daniel Lowrie, and
in today's episode we are kicking
off our Linux command line series.
It's gonna be a lot of fun,
gonna learn a lot about Linux.
And joining us in the studio,
our good friend, Mr. Don Pezet.
Don, welcome to the show, sir.
Thanks for coming today.
Hey, thanks for having me, Daniel.
And this is a really fun topic for me.
Diving into the shell and
actually getting these working.
We've got a series coming up on batch
scripting that's gonna have a ton of
really cool things that you can do that
are all driven by the command line.
So we need to know how to get in and
interact with that shell,
interact with the interface that we have,
to actually kind of
talk right to the Linux kernel and
get to do some really neat stuff.
And one of the things that I always try
and remember is that in the Linux world,
almost everything is developed
from the command line first, and
then eventually gets a nice little GUI
stuck on it, a graphical user interface.
But if you just stick in
the graphical environment,
you're really limited, there's only so
many things you can do.
And when you pull those shackles off and
dive right into the command line,
sky's the limit.
So you can do so much stuff.
So I'm excited to dive into it here in
this episode, and really the whole series,
to be able to see what we can do from
the command line, how we can use it, and
some of the neat utilities that are there
that let us talk to that system.
Well, Don, when we start talking about
terminals, right, the command line stuff,
there are terminals.
It's a little black box that pops up and
we type command into it.
And we think, that's kind of vanilla.
But there's a bit more to it than that,
right?
Yeah, in the olden days where we had
a mainframe or something in that nature,
you would have a dummy terminal.
And a dummy terminal was a keyboard and
a monitor, and when you sat down at it,
you would just see a command prompt.
You didn't have a graphical user
interface, you didn't have a mouse.
But on most computers these days,
when you sit down at them, you actually
get a graphical user interface.
So that the terminal, the command line,
is kind of hidden away behind the scenes,
right?
So we need to know how to get to it.
And fortunately, there's actually
a number of different ways to get to it.
Now, remember that Linux,
whether it's running as a desktop or
whether it's running as a server,
it really is the same under the hood.
There's a lot of operating
systems that differentiate.
You have Windows Server versus
Windows Desktop, two different products.
But in the Linux world,
it's really the same.
The big difference is that when
you install Linux as a server,
you normally leave the GUI off.
So if you push the power
button on a Linux server,
on the screen you see
the text-based terminal,
the command prompt that you can jump
into and start to work with, right?
But if you do it on a desktop,
you get a graphic user interface.
Some people put a graphic
user interface on a server.
But you're not really supposed to,
but you can.
So either way, if we get the graphical
interface, how do we get at it?
Well, it's not that
the text-based one is gone,
the text-based one is
just kind of hidden away.
So let me show you here on my laptop.
So this is my laptop, I use it every
single day, and so I have a graphical user
interface on it because I don't want to
do everything from the command shell.
Although, I do a surprising
amount of things.
Quite a bit, yeah.
[LAUGH] So when I log in,
it's graphical, right?
So I can launch in here and
I can browse my files, and
do all the different things that I
need to do right here through a GUI.
And then that's great, right?
But if I want to access the terminal,
the command prompt is actually
running in the background.
I just don't see it, right?
On most Linux distributions, you actually
have usually about six text-mode
terminals that are running in the
background you're just not seeing, right?
They fire up briefly while the computer's
booting up, and then the GUI loads and
takes over from there.
So I'm in X Windows but no Window
managers, all kind of running and
giving a GUI.
If you wanna see the text based stuff,
you can, but
it's not as good as it used to be.
And the main problem with that
is high resolution monitors.
So the monitor on my laptop,
I forget my resolution,
it's something like 3,200 by 1,800
something ridiculous like that.
Crazy.
And high resolution monitor,
even like a 1920 by 1080 monitor these
days makes the terminal almost unreadable.
It's like a postage stamp
on your screen, it's crazy.
It's really tiny.
So here, let me pull mine up.
And I'm just gonna switch right over
to one of my text-mode terminals.
So you're gonna see my monitor blank out,
and then there it is, okay?
I'm now in a text-mode terminal.
And it's asking me to login.
Now, how do I know that?
[LAUGH]
Because if you look, I mean,
that is really, really small.
I know for you guys in TV land, you're
seeing this in the little boxed in view.
But even if you were to full screen it,
it's really small.
Even looking at my own monitor,
it is really small, I can barely read it.
And unfortunately, there's no way for
me to adjust that without like really
going in and re-engineering this terminal.
You have to put in a giant font and
all this other stuff, so
there's not an easy way to do it.
As a result, this is not how we
normally access the terminal.
If you do, if you ever want to do this,
the keyboard shortcuts are Ctrl+Alt+F1.
And it's usually Ctrl+ F1 through F7, and
one of those will have the GUI, okay?
Most operating systems
today put the GUI on F1.
So if I hit ctrl+alt+F1, it should
return me back to my GUI, all right?
Some distros put it one F7, though.
And you hit Ctrl+Alt+F7, and there you go.
Meanwhile, one through six,
or whatever ones aren't used,
those are the text-based terminals.
So they're there, they're running,
and you use them.
If you ever lock up your graphical
user interface and you're stuck,
you can drop to one of those terminals and
try and fix the problem,
it's nice to have, if you also
have a magnifying glass [LAUGH].
[LAUGH]
So
that's not the normal way that
we get into our command prompt,
to get into that kind session
to talk to the Linux kernel.
So instead, what we normally
use is a terminal program.
And there are a number of different
terminal programs that are available.
And what you'll find is that over time,
you'll find one you really like,
that you'll kind of bond with,
you'll team up and be buddies.
That's like the Linux manifesto, right?
Is do it the way you like to do it and
there's many options on the smorgasbord
of different things that do
kinda the same stuff, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And there's no right or wrong answer here.
You need to find the one that
works out the best for you.
Now, the best piece of advice I can
give you is don't just use what I use,
because what I use is just what I like.
And I get a little bit lazy sometimes,
not lazy as in I don't want to do work,
but lazy as in I'm in a hurry and I want
to get to a terminal as fast as I can.
There might be some flashy terminal
that has a lot of bells and
whistles that's awesome.
But if it's not installed by default,
I don't want to deal with it cuz I don't
have time to install the terminal.
I want to use something
that's already there.
So a lot of times, I'll pick one
that I know is not as feature rich.
So don't let me influence you.
You need to find out what works for you.
Or you might agree with me and say, hey,
I only want to use stuff
that's installed natively.
I don't want to have to install extra
packages to get to some crazy terminal.
Now, when you install your Linux distro,
it will have at least
one terminal available.
And so you can use whatever GUI
you've got, if you got Unity,
or I'm on GNOME here, if you have KDE.
When you bring up your menu and
you just type in terminal,
something's going to come up, okay?
Now, I have a number of terminals
installed in my machine, so
I see several choices.
But you may only see one, right?
It just depends on the distro.
And the one that you'll normally
have is this guy right here,
he's called Xterm, right?
The X Windows GUI is kind of the defacto
standard for graphical interfaces.
Now, it's changing.
We have a replacement for X Windows
called, or Xterm is what that's actually
called, that's slowly being
replaced by a product called Mir.
And, or sorry, not Mir, Wayland.
There we go [LAUGH].
Gotta get my managers right.
So Wayland is kinda taking over, so
you might not have XTerm in that case.
In which case, you have other
terminals that might be available.
But normally,
a distro will take some terminal and
label it as just plain old terminal, okay?
Now in a GNOME environment that's actually
what's called the GNOME Terminal.
In a KDE environment, this would be
linking to what's called Konsole.
Which I actually have installed also,
Konsole with a K.
This is from KDE.
But there are other terminals that
are out there that you might see.
All of them provide the same
basic functionality.
But then some of them
add a lot of bells and
whistles that enable you to
do some really neat things.
So if I were to launch into xterm,
that's the oldest one.
That's the most basic terminal.
And when I get into it, I see-
A postage stamp.
It's pretty small.
[LAUGH]
And if I were to zoom in,
I can read it now, right?
But xterm is really operating the same way
as those text mode terminals
in the background.
It's just putting a GUI
wrapper around that terminal.
And I can get in and
I can do some set term commands to try and
change the background color.
And other things to try and
make it useful.
But as far as the GUI is concerned,
there's not really any options for me.
There's not much of a menu here
other than minimize and maximize.
And even if I go up to the menu
items up here, there's just quit.
I don't get a lot of
functionality with xterm.
This was the original, graphical
terminal that was made available and so
it's got a very basic set.
So most of us aren't gonna use that one.
Most of us are gonna use GNOME Term or
Konsole if you're in KDE.
But GNOME Term is really
the most popular one.
If you're running Ubuntu,
Debian, Fedora, RedHat, Centos.
All of those distros
default to Gnome Term.
Ubuntu is using the Unity window manager.
But the Unity window manager actually
uses GNOME Term as its terminal.
So even though it's not GNOME,
it's still using that terminal.
So that's kind of the most popular one.
And that's the one that I'm gonna use for
the rest of this series.
So for the whole series,
I'm going to be using the GNOME Terminal.
But I wanna walk you through a few of the
other terminals here in this episode to
give you an idea of which ones might
be great or which ones might be lame.
They get kind of fancy,
don't they, Don?
They really do.
Some of them, some have some
really impressive feature sets.
So, for example,
let me just fire up real quick.
We'll breeze through a few real quick and
then I'll do a deeper
dive into some of them.
So, for example, the GNOME Termina.
If I just fire up my terminal, this is the
GNOME Terminal, the default built one in.
See how I got a nice big font?
Well, it didn't have that by default but I
was able to change it because I've got all
these menu options up here
where I can tweak it.
I can change the font size.
I can change the colors.
I can change what's being rendered.
There's a lot that you can do [CROSSTALK].
I love the fact that once
you make those changes,
a lot of these will have
profiles you can create.
And say,
I want this to be my default profile.
And that way if I want
to do different things,
I can just load different profiles
that's already preset for me.
That is a fantastic option on
newer style terminals like this.
Yeah, and some of the other features
they add really take advantage of the GUI.
If I need more than one terminal open,
I can open more than one window, right?
You can go up here to file and
open terminal and
now I've got two terminal windows open so
I could run two different commands.
But this one actually have
tabbed terminals as well.
Under that file option here,
I had open tab.
And so now I could have two tabs,
or three tabs, or four tabs.
You just do Ctrl+Shift+T and
I get more and more tabs.
So I might run something like,
maybe I run Midnight Commander which
I don't have installed, so
let me install Midnight Commander.
So I'm installing a program here and
while it's installing I could jump
over to another tab and be doing work.
And then when I come back to the first
tab, it finished installing.
I can run Midnight Commander so
now it's running.
And I can switch over to another tab and
perform more work.
And so I can take advantage of those tabs
to do more than one thing all from
right inside of the terminal.
So that's kind of a nice feature to have
that we didn't have in the older xterm.
Or you definitely don't have in the
text-based console if I do Ctrl+Alt+F1.
Although I could Ctrl+Alt+F1,
F2, F3 and move between them.
That was the earliest
form of multitasking.
That you could run these full screen or
locked applications that
would lock your session and
just switch over to another terminal and
fire up more applications that way.
So you had that functionality.
Now, GNOME Term is pretty powerful.
But there're some things that it
doesn't do that other consoles or
other terminals might
do that you appreciate.
So, for example,
I use one called Guake, G-U-A-K-E.
Guake is nice because it is built off of,
it's actually modeled after
the old video game Quake.
In the video game Quake,
it was one of the first video
games that had a dropdown console.
You could hit,
I think it was tilde on the keyboard.
And this little console would drop
down from the top of the screen, and
you could type in cheat codes.
It's really all you ever type.
For people like me that
use a terminal a lot.
I'm constantly going to the terminal.
I don't necessarily want it to be
a window that pops up like this.
I would like it just to be something
that I can quickly access.
And if you install Guake,
it's running in the background.
I've actually got a little tool item,
whoops, somewhere up here that shows it.
Well, anyhow, it's way up here.
This little tool item and
I can hit F12 on on my keyboard and
there's a console that pops up and
I have that access.
And so if I wanna jump in and
run something really quick I can.
And it's really handy if I'm, now,
I'm browsing on the internet and
I come across some tutorial, right?
So maybe I'm doing a Vim tutorial
to learn some Vim commands.
And so I'm here and
I'm reading about how to do something and
then I pull up that terminal.
I run something real quick.
I get it out of the way.
And so just tied to my F12 key,
I can make that pop up and come and go, so
that's a neat feature.
It's a different terminal but I like it
because it gives me some functionality
that I don't have in the normal terminal.
Another one that I use from
time to time is Terminator.
Terminator is a third-party terminal.
It's available in Ubuntu, and Debian,
Fedora, it's available in all of them.
And it has a neat function that
let's you split the screen, right?
In GNOME Terminal, I could do tabs and
if I had multiple tabs I could
have multiple terminals but I couldn't
see them both at the same time, right?
If I wanted to see more then one thing at
the same time, I could fire up Terminator.
And with a simple right-click
I can split horizontally, or
split vertically, so
I'll do a vertical split.
And now I've got two
terminals side-by-side.
And I could even come in and take one and
I could split it horizontally.
And now I'm starting to lay these out
where I've got all these different
terminals.
And that's handy because I might be
running something like htop here.
So I'm monitoring
performance on my server.
And then down here,
maybe I'm doing a little journal CTL-F.
And so I'm following my system d-logs,
right.
So now in the top left,
I'm seeing system performance.
In the bottom left,
I'm seeing what's going on.
And in the right,
I could be doing my work.
I could come in and I could say,
well, I need to restart some service.
I'll restart I don't know,
I'll restart my network stack, right.
Why not?
So I'll restart something and
I can see the log messages down here
being generated as part of that restart.
And I can see any CPU or
memory activity that was modified by it.
And I could start to
do more than one task.
That's a pretty neat function.
By being able to slice
your screen up like this,
is not something I could do in GNOME.
But I can easily do it
right here in Terminator.
So that's where I go back in saying when
it comes to picking a terminal, there's
a ton of them that are out there and you
need to find the one that you like best.
These guys right here, they each have some
kind of shining advantage to them, right?
Terminator can split the screen but
it's not installed by default.
I would have to install it if
I wanted to use it, right?
So if I'm in a hurry on a system,
I might not want to install it.
I might wanna use
something that's built-in.
But boy, slicing up the screen
like this is pretty handy, right?
Same thing goes for Guake.
It's really nice to have that drop down
from the top that I have to install it and
get it set up.
It's not installed by default.
So I might not wanna deal with that.
It's kind of a pros and
cons type approach.
You need to find out which
one meets your needs.
Yeah, Don, and I really like
how it splits the screen for you.
Because if you've ever tried to, and even
if you come from a Windows background.
And you're like,
let me check out this Linux thing.
You have the black screens and
you're moving around.
You're trying to, I'll snap to this side,
snap to that side.
And try to get everything
to look just like you like.
Where I'm just, okay, split this, split
that, and it's kind of doing that for me.
It takes a lot of the hard work out of it,
of getting everything lined up perfectly.
And that kind of takes us into something
else, Don, which we kind of alluded to,
which was customizing these terminals.
Can you walk us through
some of that customization?
Yeah, so let me fire up my
regular Gnome terminal again.
And I want to show you guys profiles,
right?
Profiles, Daniel mentioned them earlier,
are a way that we can kind
of customize our terminal.
And change the way that it appears and
get it to suit our needs.
The default profile for
most systems is not something that I like.
It's usually very small,
it's maybe not a font that I like.
And so I usually do some customizations
there that are part of my user profile.
I bring it along with me when
I sit down at a new system.
So if I wanna go in and
take a look at that.
What we do is inside of Gnome,
if you take a look at your menus up top,
or inside a Gnome terminal.
We can go to Edit, and
under Edit you'll see two options,
there's Preferences, and
Profile Preferences.
And that is a little bit confusing,
why do I have these two
things that are very similar?
Preferences, those are settings that
affect the entire terminal, right?
Not just my little session inside of it.
And the Profile Preferences,
that's what affects my session.
So let's start with Preferences,
and kind of see what's in there.
You'll find that there's actually not
a whole lot of options tucked away inside
of this.
So taking a quick glance at it,
first I've got, Show menubar by default.
Well, I need my menubar,
that's why I'm in the options.
But if you've memorized all
the keyboard shortcuts,
you might not need that menubar.
You can get a little
more screen real estate.
Enable mnemonics, such as Alt+F
to open the File menu, right?
Those are turned off by default because we
might need to send Alt+F to the program
running inside of the terminal, right?
But if you use those, you can turn it on.
This is one that I usually turn off,
this is on by default.
Enable the menu accelerator key,
F10 by default.
Which means if you hit F10,
the next series of keys you hit is being
sent to the menu for the terminal.
Well, there's a lot of programs like
Midnight Commander that I ran earlier.
F10 is the key to exit Midnight Commander.
If it's mapped to the terminal,
that's gonna make it where I can't exit
Midnight Commander, it's a [LAUGH].
Open another terminal, and [LAUGH].
You could, you find a way around it.
But it's neat that we can come in and
we can change that.
And then you've got themes.
So we can do the Light theme or
the Dark theme.
You got shortcuts that you can define.
You can override keyboard shortcuts
to set them with different themes.
Maybe you just don't find
the default ones very intuitive.
The Profiles I'll talk about in a second.
And then the Encodings, right?
If you're here in the US,
it usually defaults to UTF-8,
which is probably what this one is at.
Let's find out, yeah, UTF-8.
But if you are in another country,
if you're typing in other languages.
Well, UTF-8 is designed to be universal,
that's what the whole U part is.
But some languages still
aren't perfect with that.
So you will see where there's other
character sets that you can use.
Like Greek or Cyrillic to be able
to support your alphabet and
render it better on screen.
So those are things we can change.
None of those settings that I just
showed you have to do with font size,
or color, or
performance of the console itself.
So these are all just kinda general
settings that apply to the terminal.
Under Profiles,
this is where we create Profiles.
And you'll have one profile by
default it's usually called Default.
I've renamed mine Don's Custom, but
you can call it whatever you want.
You can have one or more Profiles, and
the Profiles are where all your
special settings really end up.
That's where the real work gets
done inside of these things.
So if I have a shared computer
that I use alongside Daniel.
He might have his profile and
I have my own profile, and
we can easily switch back and forth.
Now that doesn't normally happen.
Because normally, Daniel has his own user
account, I have my own user account, so
we don't bump heads.
Never the twain shall meet, right?
But I might need some
different profile based on
applications that I'm running, right?
I might have a certain color scheme that
works well with one application, and
doesn't work well with another.
So I can come in, and I can create those.
But a lot of times, we'll just have one.
You can use the Default one if you want,
and
you can edit it to
customize it how you want.
Now I went into the Preferences screen.
And if I choose Edit, it's going to
take me to the Profile Preferences.
That's the same as if I've gone
back out here and gone to Edit and
Profile Preferences.
The difference is this immediately
takes me to the Don's Custom profile.
Versus going to the regular
Preferences screen,
I can pick which profile I want to
edit if I have more than one profile.
So that's the only difference.
If I just wanna modify the profile I'm
currently in, I can go to Edit, and
Profile Preferences and
jump right in there.
And now we can jump in and
start to customize things.
Now I wanna show you some of the standard
things that I customize, right?
The first thing, just the very first thing
that I do is go to a custom font, right?
A lot of times the default
font is set to Monospace 10.
And a 10 pitch font on a high resolution
monitor is very, very difficult to read.
Now, I'm getting older.
[LAUGH]
Getting a little older each day, and
it gets harder and harder for me to see.
So I need a slightly bigger font.
You might be young, you're 18,
you're in high school, and
you can read a microscopic font.
And so you set the highest
resolution font, good for you.
Or you're Mike Rodrick.
One of our other hosts,
he always has tiny fonts,
I don't understand it.
But you can pick whatever font you want,
and you can make that larger or smaller.
You can actually choose from
a number of different fonts.
Maybe, I have seen people that like the
ones that look like cursive or whatever.
You can get all kinds of fancy-pants
with this stuff, if you want.
And you can load custom fonts too,
if you really wanna go crazy.
Those look good, I like that.
Some don't work as well as others.
[LAUGH] So you might not want those.
We're not going to pick the Wingdings
font or whatever, or Webdings.
But you can customize this
to be pleasing to you.
If you are going to be working
in this terminal a lot,
you want it to be
something that makes sense.
But for me it's normally the font
size that impacts me the most, and
I can see that right down here.
I've got mine at a 16 pitch,
you might need to go even larger.
If you're on a super
high resolution monitor,
you may want it at a 24 or
something higher like that.
But usually, 10 or 11 is the default and
for me that's just too small.
So we can customize that.
After that,
there's other things we can customize
like the Initial terminal size, okay.
Now, the default here, let's do this.
Let me get out of this one.
And I'm gonna go and I'm gonna switch, let
me go into my Preferences and Profiles,
all right?
And I'm gonna create a new Profile here,
right?
And this is just at the default,
so see how it's Monospace 12,
slightly off on that.
But the initial terminal size is 80 and
24, right?
So that's kind of the default
settings here for
this Unnamed profile that I've created.
So I'm going to take that profile, and so
we've got this Unnamed
profile right there.
And I'm going to switch
my terminal to use that.
Now, you probably noticed the option
where I can pick the default
profile that's going to be used.
And right now it's going
to default to Don's Custom.
So I'm gonna choose Unnamed,
and the reason I'm doing that is I want
it to just launch when I first launch.
We can always switch when
we launch a new terminal,
when we open one from
an existing terminal.
But when you open a new one
it takes that default value.
And so here's the default terminal.
And you'll see kind of my point,
it's really small, it's hard to read.
It's not necessarily the ideal situation.
It's also not very wide, okay?
Now, I can come in and hit
Ctrl+Shift+Plus and make it bigger, okay?
But that's a one time thing.
If I come up here and
say File ; Open Terminal,
until I actually get choices now
between which Profile I wanna use.
I can open another one unnamed and
see how the new one comes back small.
It even does that with tabs,
which is super annoying.
[LAUGH]
[LAUGH] If I go to open a tab and
I do it unnamed, see how this tab
is small, and then this tab is big?
As I switch tabs, it's changing.
That's pretty annoying, too.
I feel like I'm on
psychedelics watching that.
What's going on here?
[LAUGH]
It's usability, right?
We have to get in here and kind of
customize this to meet our needs, right?
That's just really the whole
point of having these profiles
is being able to set them to whatever
it is that our system needs.
So if I go back into my preferences, I can
change that default profile back to mine.
And I can edit it.
But I like to modify the font size,
and then the width of the terminal.
The terminal itself will
default to 80 by 24,
cuz that's what the old
dummy terminals used.
The mainframe terminals I mentioned,
they were 80 characters wide and
24 characters or lines tall.
That can be kind of small on
our new widescreen monitors.
Most people buy 16 by
9 monitors these days.
So it makes sense to make
the terminal a little wider.
i usually go 100 by 24,
like that, is kinda my default.
A few other things you can tweak,
the terminal bell.
The terminal bell is super annoying.
[LAUGH]
Any time,
maybe you backspace to delete characters
and there's no more characters,
every time you hit backspace it goes ding,
ding, ding.
It gets annoying.
Some people really like that, right?
So we can leave that bell on or off.
Mine's on, but I keep my laptop muted so
it doesn't matter.
But you might wanna disable that.
You can specify a command.
When you first launch the terminal,
what does it do?
Well, the default is it drops you to
command prompt, and it sits there and
it waits for you to do something.
But if there's a command that you run
every time you launch the terminal,
you can come in here and tell it,
hey, I want you to run a command.
Maybe I don't want it to
go to a regular terminal.
Maybe I want it to go to
something special, like tmux.
Tmux is a special kind of terminal
that's very much like Terminator.
They'll let you slice up the screen, but
it does it all with keyboard shortcuts,
and it does it all in one session.
It's kind of,
it's almost borderline magic.
[LAUGH]
So I can say, hey,
when I launch a shell, I want you to just
go straight into tmux, don't go into Bash,
or whatever my default
shell happens to be.
So you can override those values here.
Normally, we don't do that,
but you could do it.
The colors?
The colors are kinda fun.
In the olden days, right, we just had
white text on a black background.
Or maybe the other way around.
Black text on a white background.
Or your favorite,
black text on black background.
[LAUGH]
Yeah, yeah.
It's always great.
[LAUGH]
The stealth shell, right?
[LAUGH] But you can change it.
You'll see like green on black,
to get that true retro feel.
[LAUGH] [INAUDIBLE] that,
you'll really feel like a dummy terminal.
You can do that.
But all of these color settings
can be overridden from within
the terminal itself.
And you'll see that pretty frequently
when you're working with these terminals
because things get colorized.
When I pulled up my directory listing,
different files had different colors.
That's being determined by
the shell that I'm using.
So the terminal has a default color set,
and that's really what
you're picking here.
And then the shell can override
that at different places.
And there's some default schemes
that you can choose from.
You'll see down here,
mine's set to custom for some reason.
I don't remember customizing it.
But you can choose from some of these
other default color schemes to pick
whatever it is that you want and
get things kind of set to your liking.
The scrolling tab is kind
of an important one for me.
As you run commands, there's often
times when commands will exceed
the top row of your screen,
it'll scroll off the screen.
You need to be able to scroll back and
see it.
Some operating systems have that
scroll back buffer set really small.
If it's only set to 100 lines, and
I do a yum update and
there's more than 50 updates,
it's gonna be more than 100 lines, I'm
gonna lose messages that were at the top.
Okay, that's how it works.
So I need to have scrollback buffer
that's big enough to let me
scroll back to see messages.
Now you don't want to go too big,
because where does that
scrollback buffer get stored?
It's stored in RAM.
So the bigger your scrollback buffer,
the more RAM you're eating up.
Now this day and age, we usually have tons
of RAM, so it's not that big of a deal.
But you don't wanna set this to be
millions of lines stored in RAM.
So 10,000 here is actually a really good
number, that's a huge number of lines to
scroll back and see, but
without consuming too much memory.
But you might wanna tweak that and change
it, make it smaller, make it bigger.
You certainly have that option.
Well, Don, I know a lot of people
like to, and with these newer terminals,
they have the ability to increase
the transparency of the terminal.
Very cool stuff, kind of an effect thing.
But that's kind of a personal thing,
right?
It is, I hate it.
Where is that, is that under colors?
Yeah,
I've noticed you're not a huge fan.
No, I absolutely hate it.
Here it is, transparent background.
If you watch a hacker movie-
[LAUGH]
Any hacker movie.
Any hacker movie,
they love the transparent terminals.
I don't know why.
It's like, I've got this readable
terminal, let's make it less readable.
The transparency, right, so if I turn
that on, this transparent background,
what it does is it takes
the background of your terminal and
it makes it read kind of see through it.
And the idea behind that is if I
have multiple terminals, right?
So let me close out of this.
I'm gonna open up a new terminal, right?
And I'm in here and I'm doing work, well,
see how you can see my wallpaper
through the terminal now?
You can see the big 7.
I see the Linux.
The word Linux up there, yeah.
I'm seeing through my terminal.
And if I open up another terminal window,
see how I can see the old
terminal through my new terminal?
It gets super confusing, doesn't it?
[LAUGH]
Well, I think the idea was if I needed
some information from the other terminal
I could see it while I'm in here.
But in practice what happens is you
end up with just overlapping stuff.
And it becomes really confusing and
difficult to read.
And this is just terminal windows, right?
Maybe I've got a webpage open,
and so I'm browsing to ITProTV,
and so I'm browsing the Internet,
there we go.
And so I fire open my terminals,
and I can kind of see through them.
And I've got the transparency set at 50%.
That's probably a little
too aggressive here.
If we were to tweak that down a bit,
it creates a kind of artistic
effect that some people like.
I absolutely hate it.
[LAUGH]
But some people, boy,
they just love that stuff.
So if I take that transparent background,
and
let me ratchet it down to
a more reasonable level, right?
Now you can still sort of
see the web page behind it,
but it's not totally in the way.
You can get that and
increase a nice little artistic effect.
There are some distros that
have this set by default.
Again, I usually just come in and
disable that transparent background.
Now I can read everything nice and neat.
That's the way that I like it.
Now Don, I know we're running
super short on time, but
I was wondering if you could just touch on
some of the, or one of the major things
that we do inside of our computing
experience, which is copy, cut, or paste.
Okay.
Can we do this in the terminal and
can we go from like your web
browser to the terminal?
Yeah, you can, but
it does get a little bit tricky, right?
So normally,
when you're in an application,
like if I'm in a web browser back here.
And I wanna copy
Enjoy IT Training Courses, so
I wanna copy this little marketing slogan.
I can take that and I can hit Ctrl+C
on my keyboard and that copies.
And then when I go up here,
I can hit Ctrl+V and it pastes, right?
Well, that works.
It even works in a lot of terminals,
but it doesn't work in every terminal.
And, the main reason is that Ctrl+C
is usually a breaking command.
It's how you abort a command.
So for example, if I start pinging
some server, It's gonna ping, and
it's gonna ping forever,
until I hit Ctrl+C.
Ctrl+C tells it to stop, right?
Ctrl+C doesn't tell it to copy,
it tells it to stop.
And so if I highlight some text, like with
my mouse here, I'll highlight some text,
and hit Ctrl+C, it didn't copy.
And if I do Ctrl+V,
it doesn't do much of anything, right?
So those traditional copy and
paste don't quite work the way
that you might expect them to.
Now you can always use your mouse,
right, which is a little bit anti-Unix.
But we're not in Unix,
right, we're in Linux.
I can highlight with the mouse and
I can right-click and I can choose copy,
and then I can right-click and
I can choose paste.
And there we go, it worked, right?
But a lot of terminals will rematch
shortcuts to something that actually does
work inside of a terminal.
Whichever terminal you pick, you'll need
to look at what its defaults are, right?
Back up here and edit and preferences.
We had the shortcuts and right here is
where I could define a number of shortcuts
including copy and paste.
And if you take a look at
the ones that are in here,
it's got Shift+Ctrl+C, Shift+Ctrl+V.
So instead of just hitting
Ctrl+C I hit shift as well and
that's how it avoids sending
the breaking command, right?
So that'll make sure that it does that and
ensures that I can copy it.
So now, I could come in and
I could highlight something.
And I could hit, I don't usually do
Shift+Ctrl, I usually do Ctrl+Shift.
But Ctrl+Shift+C to copy and
then Ctrl+Shift+V and
there I'm pasting what I highlighted,
all right?
Now in the GNOME Terminal,
that's the way you do it.
That's the shortcut that you remember.
In some terminals though they do
what's called copy on highlight,
where if you just highlight
something the moment you
let go off your mouse it
copies it into the clipboard.
And the moment you right click it
immediately paste that data, right?
The GNOME Terminal doesn't do that but
there are terminals that do.
And they usually just call that
copy on click or copy on highlight.
So as you dig through
the options on your terminal,
you may find something
that indicates that.
And I don't think I have
that option here at all.
If we take a look at even Shortcuts,
O'm pretty sure GNOME Terminal
doesn't support that.
But like I said, yours might and if you
dig through your options you may find it
and see where you can turn that on or
customize that option.
So that's another way we might do that.
But again, it does vary a bit
from terminal to terminal.
All right.
Well Don,
we've run out of time with this episode.
I know you have more to go,
jumping into the shells area or the arena,
should I say.
Yeah.
But looks like we'll have to wait for
part two on that.
We do thank you for joining today.
Is there anything you'd like to
part our guests with before we go?
I certainly didn't get to
every terminal in the world,
there's hundreds of them, and
you might have a favourite one.
I know I left out Konsole,
the one from KDE.
KDE's console has a neat little bookmark
feature, where you can bookmark folders as
you navigate your file system,
you can bookmark location.
And so when you launch that console,
you can say go to this bookmark and
it jumps right to that
location on the file system.
Very nice.
It's a neat feature.
All of those terminals, they have bright
shiny spots that make them great to use.
They usually have a couple of
cons that make them not so great.
You just gotta find the one that's
perfect for you and it's trial and error.
Usually they're very small so
it's easy to install a bunch of them.
I probably have five different
terminals installed here.
Just take a look at what you've got and
find out what one you like and
just know that it's pretty easy to
move to another one if you chose to.
That's right.
It never hurts to test drive something,
right?
You're not locked into it.
You don't like it, you delete it,
and you move on to the next thing.
Don, thanks for joining us today.
We appreciate your expertise on this and
imparting that into us.
But as I've said,
we're out of time for this episode.
Definitely come back for
part two as we look into shells.
But as for this episode and we are gonna
go ahead and sign off for ITProTV.
I've been your host Daniel Lawry.
And I'm Don Pezet.
And we'll see you next time.
[MUSIC]
Thank you for watching ITProTV.
Overview
The Linux Command Line show is designed to introduce viewers to working on Linux based computers using only the command line interface. This is considered the first step in learning BASH scripting as most scripts are made up of a series of CLI commands.
Learning Style
On Demand
Length of course
9h 12m
20 Episodes
Here are the topics we'll cover
- Getting Started with the CLI
- Basic Shell Commands
- Advanced Shell Commands
- Shell Environments
- Installing Software
- Editing Files
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