Thanks, but that is way, way too advanced for the people I'll be working with. The level should be more like "there's a 'sort' command and this is what it does," or an explanation of pipes, or how to use the semi-colon on the command line, or parentheses to make subshells, but some of those are even a little advanced. These are psychology and genetics grad students. The biggest questions I have are about the best order to teach things in. What's best -- explain the concept of a shell, or just start typing commands? Probably the former, then go to the kernel/shell concept, then back to commands. They need to know about "arguments" and "options". They don't know anything. I know that they can make good use of sort, grep and awk for grabbing certain info in big data files. They need to know how to use 'less' for looking at output. Then there are gazillions more little things that we use like cp, mv, cd, df, du, cut, paste, tr and a lot of aliases, plus a lot more that I can't think of off the cuff. Like I said, I've done this before but I was hoping someone knew some good web pages for the basics, in a step-by-step kind of layout. Mike On Wed, 20 Mar 2013, Jake Vath wrote: > I, typically, point people to the Advanced Bash-Scripting > Guide<http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/> > . > Although the title says 'Advanced', It has a good introduction to shell > programming (who's, what's, why's...etc). > It also has a great section on the 'Basics' of shell scripting. > > I reference this guide quite ofter. > I hope this helps. > > -> Jake > > On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > >> I have been doing this now and then for a long time, but resources on the >> web are always changing and there may be lots of good new stuff. The thing >> is, there's always so much out there that it's hard to decide which things >> to use. >> >> I'll be teaching a group of grad students how to use our Linux server next >> Tuesday. I always start by showing the basic commands like ls, rm, mkdir, >> etc. The best thing would be to minimize class time dedicated to that kind >> of thing and give them something nice on the web that will show them a lot >> of the most useful things people do from the command prompt. There's so >> much to know and it's hard to decide where to start and where to end. So >> I'd like to give them something they can use to go much farther on their >> own, for those who want to do that. >> >> It would be great to hear from you guys if you have some ideas about >> good web resources for training Linux users (all using Bash shell). >> Thanks.