Additional Topics
Tab Completion
Hitting <TAB> autocompletes what you're typing, based on the names of the files and directories in your current directory. Hit <TAB> constantly to make yourself more productive.
Filename Wildcards
Sometimes we want to refer to a bunch of similar files, to do this we can use wildcards. Think of wildcards as placeholders for any text. The most common wildcard to use is * usually along with a file extension.
The above command lists all files that end in .txt, but begin with anything.
History
Lastly, there are a few different commands for checking your terminal's history. What have we been up to? Use the up and down arrow keys, or the history command.
Environment Variables
Your current terminal session has variables called environment variables. There are really useful for storing commonly used commands and settings. Try typing env to view all of your environment variables.
You can also set your own environment variables in your shell's configuration file ~/.zshrc. Storing the variables in the configuration file will load them for every session.
If you want to create a temporary environment variable, here's an example:
To access the variable:
Getting Help
For any command we discuss here, the command man, short for manual, will give a (hopefully) detailed explanation of that command. Sometimes that explanation will be too detailed for you. When you get lost in a man page and you want to understand it, start again from the beginning of of the man page and keep repeating. Hopefully you will get further into the page each time you read it.
Many third party commands also accept the --help option, but not all, but if you get stuck it can be worth a try. Most of the commands covered in this lesson overview do not support this feature. However, commands like git do!
Useful Links
You may want to start bookmarking this and other resources you find helpful
You can try entering these shells by typing their names
Example:
bashopens the bash shell. Typeexitto exit the shell
A useful tutorial similar to ours, but with a few additional commands
We won't cover this much, but there's a whole scripting language for running programs in the shell! Try going through this sometime to become a productivity mastermind.
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