The goal of this course is to provide you strong foundations so you can start using the Bash and Command Line Tools on Linux to be more efficient in your daily work. But most important, I want to give you the confidence & the skills required so you’ll be able to improve your knowledge by yourself and according to your needs.
The course is not designed as an extensive list of all standard Unix & Linux command line tools. I don’t think video would be the best medium for such reference material. If you’re looking for that, try instead to check out some of the numerous books written on the topic, or search onto the Internet for freely available resources. In fact, such resources might be very good complement to this course.
Hey! In a couple of places I mentioned you can have a discount coupon for this course. But where is that coupon?
Since I initially published this course, Udemy (my course hosting platform) has changed their pricing policy. Since I can no longer offer you a discount, I decided to move the course to the lowest price tier.
Now, everyone will benefit from the new price. Please use the blue button at the top of this page to go to the enrollment page listing the new price. The link contains a referrer token that ensures I will get a small fraction of your paid price. Thanks.
The course is based on real world examples where the Bash & Command Line Tools are used to solve everyday problems. You are encouraged to try and experiment on your own system with the examples given in the lectures.
Many lectures end with a challenge you will have to solve. Most of the time, you will have to apply or make change to the commands seen in the course. But sometimes, this will require some experiments and researches on the Internet or in the online help system (the man).
You are encouraged to use the forum/QA Section of the course Hosting Platform to ask questions. But also to post your own solutions to the challenges. As well as to share tips & tricks related to the course.
You should have a working Linux system
You should be able to add new software using your package manager
As part of the course lecture, you will :
download & check file type & integrity using md5 or sha-2 sums
unzip & extract archive using the command line only
use regular expressions to search & transform data stored in a text file
use glob patterns to move tens or hundreds of files in only one command
aggregate, filter & process scientific, economic or financial data stored in a tabular text format (like CSV) without using a spreadsheet
combine several basic commands to perform complex tasks
gain the confidence & the skills required to improve your knowledge by yourself
If you want to spend less time on repetitive tasks on your computer : using the command line, it is usually not much more difficult to apply a command to many files rather than to only one.
If you worked on Unix previously but want a refresher on the "new" features of the Bash : I made extensive use of modern Bash features not available for example in the historic Bourne Shell (sh)
If you are a student discovering the shell & the command line at school, but you want a different point of view or need more examples.
If you are regularly working with text data that need to be transformed or pre-processed.
If you watched Matrix or Tron & though command line is cool but you have no clue where to start from. And yes, command line is cool. But no, I’m not Trinity…
If you don’t have Linux / don’t know how to install Linux on your computer this course IS NOT for you. Linux installation and basic usage using the graphical interface is NOT covered in this course. There are plenty of tutorials on the web to show you step by step how to install Linux. But feel free to consider this course again once you system will be up & running.
If you don’t know how to add new softwares on your system using your package manager this course IS NOT for you. The package manager is a tool allowing you to install new software on your system. Each Linux distribution has its own package manager and usually provides one or several graphical tools to access it. I just can’t provide the exact procedure for each and every Linux distro. Please take some time to search on the Internet how it works on your system. Then feel free to come back to consider this course again.
If you want to learn ZSH, KSH, TCSH or any shell other than the Bash, this course is NOT for you : I made extensive use of the Bash features here. Most of them would probably be available in different shells, but the syntax is certainly not the same…
If you watched Jurassic Park and though FSN, the "File System Navigator", is the ultimate way to navigate the file system, this course is definitely NOT for you.