I am not telling anyone else how to Linux, but when I first started using it, I found this kind of thing invaluable.

I had, I think, a smaller book, "Linux Pocket Guide: Essential Commands" and that was so helpful too.

I am sure that one could use Linux without touching a terminal but, for me, the terminal is a fantastic and useful way of computing, and so upskilling in its usage has been time very well spent.

(See also books like "Practical vim" or "tmux in practice".)

@neil I bought a copy of "UNIX In A Nutshell (updated for System V R4!)" in the mid 90s and it's still my go-to reference for all things POSIX.

The spine is broken on the pages for grep, awk, sed, nroff and vi 😁

@neil (G)AWK is definitely worth the time. Simple use is almost trivial and suddenly there are things that were awkward that are now ready one-liners.

Very easy to fall into the trap of doing overly clever things, but absolutely it's worth the investment.

CC: @greem

@ColinTheMathmo @neil @greem

This is going to sound as if I'm trying to start a language war, but I'm not.

I'm genuinely surprised that people use Awk when Perl is available. I always think of Perl as having superseded Ask. What's the appeal of Awk nowadays? What am I missing? Is it just that Perl has a bad reputation because of all those dollar signs?

@CppGuy Reasonable question, and I will answer when I can sit at a proper machine and compare my thoughts. It will very much be a personal opinion.

But just now I am in a cafe halfway between home and a visit to a family member, so have not the time.

But will reply.

CC: @neil @greem