Command Line TV

By Christopher League and Christian Lopes

Technology Education Training Software How-To

What's Command Line TV about?

Command Line TV is a video podcast to help you

learn and master the Unix shell. Informally, ‘Unix’ refers to a

family of

operating systems that includes GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. Operating

a computer via the command line gives you tremendous power and flexibility,

but it’s not easy to learn. We’re here to help! We start from the

beginning, but also try to include some tips suitable for intermediate

users. Each video is about 20 minutes long, and we aim to release a new

episode every week or so.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Command Line TV episodes:

10.20.2015
Episode 12: Find and locate
We use find and locate to dig up lists of files on our system that match certain criteria. We also look at xargs for executing commands on a selected set of files.
10.13.2015
Episode 11: Filesystems
We investigate the standard filesystem hierarchy and some tools for managing filesystems.
09.29.2015
Episode 10: Shell scripts
We create shell scripts using the hash-bang header, and also look at permissions, variables, and loops in the shell.
09.22.2015
Episode 9: Redirection and substitution
We explore some more shell basics including redirection to and from files, and command substitution. This feature allows the output of one command to be used as parameters of another command.
09.15.2015
Episode 8: Package managers
In this episode, we explore some of the capabilities of package managers for installing and updating software on your system. Specifically, we look at the ‘apt’ system on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. On other systems, you might use Yum (RedHat/Fedora), Pacman (Arch), or Homebrew (Mac)....
09.08.2015
Episode 7: ImageMagick
We look at ImageMagick, a powerful suite of command-line tools for doing image processing. With it, we resize, crop, blur, and do format-conversion on a collection of image files.
09.01.2015
Episode 6: File management part 2
In this episode, we continue looking at managing files and directories using cp, rm, mkdir, and rmdir. We also show off the tree command and revisit creating an alias in our .bashrc.
08.25.2015
Episode 5: File management part 1
We use mv to move and rename files, and create a shell alias to improve the safety of one of its sharp edges. We also introduce the .bashrc configuration script, and mkdir to create directories.
08.18.2015
Episode 4: Text manipulation
We learn about text manipulation commands like cut, sort, and uniq. We build sophisticated pipelines to analyze data, including surveys and web logs. We also look briefly at invoking simple text editors from the command line, like nano, gedit, and TextEdit.
08.10.2015
Episode 3: Wildcards and grep
In this episode, we use basic wildcards to select files, and then explore how the ‘grep’ command can search for words or phrases across multiple files. As always, you can follow along using the same directory structure by downloading it from https://github.com/commandlinetv/sample-files.
08.04.2015
Episode 2: Viewing files
We look at viewing files using commands like cat, more, less, head, and tail, including using those in short pipelines. We also try opening files in external applications using open or xdg-open (and live dangerously by dumping a binary file with cat).
07.28.2015
Episode 1: echo "Hello!"
Welcome to Command Line TV, a new video podcast to help you learn and master the UNIX shell. In this first episode, we talk about our backgrounds, the scope of this endeavor, opening your terminal, and using basic commands like cd and ls...

What's Command Line TV about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Command Line TV episodes:

Episode 12: Find and locate

Episode 11: Filesystems

Episode 10: Shell scripts

Episode 9: Redirection and substitution

Episode 8: Package managers

Episode 7: ImageMagick

Episode 6: File management part 2

Episode 5: File management part 1

Episode 4: Text manipulation

Episode 3: Wildcards and grep

Episode 2: Viewing files

Episode 1: echo "Hello!"