This week I’m at the IMA workshop on Modern Applications of Representation Theory.  So far it’s been really cool!

One of the graduate students asked me about how one goes about learning the Linux command line, so I thought I would write down a few of the things I think are most useful on a day-to-day basis.  Such a list is sure to stir controversy, so feel free to comment if you see a grievous omission.  In fact, I learned the command line mainly through installing Gentoo Linux back before there was any automation whatsoever in the process, and suffering through lengthy forum posts getting every bit of my system more-or-less working.  (Note: Starting with Gentoo is probably a bad idea.  I chose it at the time because it had the best forums, but there are probably better places to start these days.  I mainly use Xubuntu these days.)

So, off to the races. I’m going to skip the really, really basic ones, like ls, cd, apt-get and sudo.  In fact, there’s a nice tutorial at LinuxCommand.org which covers a lot of the basics, including IO redirection.  Finally, I’m assuming that one is using the bash terminal.

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