Linux Up Skill - Day 5

Since the last one was so quick I’ll do another before I move on to something else today. Here is lesson five from the Linux Up Skill Challenge. This lesson is called “More or less…” and touches on five different topics.

• Get familiar with using more and less for viewing files, including being able to get to the top or bottom of a file in less, and searching for some text.
• Test how tab completion works.
• Try pressing the up arrow to scroll back through your commands. Try the history command. You can also press Ctrl + r and then any part of the command you are looking for.
• Look for “hidden” files in your home directory.
• Use nano to create a file in your home directory and type up a summary of how the last five days have worked for you.

Well let me see here. The lesson doesn’t give any examples to use more and less with. So I’ll start with the last task and make a file using nano day5description.txt. I add my summary and exit to save. Then if I run more day5description.txt it prints out the contents. I spend a few minutes playing with the switches. Then I do the same with less day5description.txt.

I’m familiar with tab completion and don’t need to spend any time here. I’m familiar with using the up and down arrows to scroll through commands but not so much with the history command. So I read through history --help and practice using the different switches. I did not know about Ctrl + r which is a really will be very useful to search through the history list.

The final topic of the lesson has me cd back to my home directory. Then I run ls- l to show my home directory contents. Then ls -la to show all contents and finally ls -ltra which shows all the files including hidden files starting with a “.”. Then it has me finish by looking at .bashrc and .bash_history. Since these are hidden files

I have used everything here but it has been so long ago it is wonderful to go over the commands and freshen them up in my mind. I’m looking forward to seeing where this course continues!