I’ve just started my Linux journey earlier this year. As a goal to learn how to self-host applications and services that will allow me to take back some control of my data. Immich instead of Google Photos, for example.
I have a local server running Unraid and 22 docker containers now. And then a VPS (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS) running two apps. I’ve learned a ton but one thing I can’t seem to wrap my brain around is navigation through the file structure using only terminal. My crutch has been to open a SFTP session in Cyberduck to the same device I’m SSH’d to and try to figure things out that way. I know enough to change directories, make directories, using Tree to show the file structure at different levels of depth. But I feel like I’m missing some efficient way to find my way to files and folders I need to get to. Or are y’all just memorizing it and know where everything is by now?
I come from a Windows background and even then I sometimes catch myself checking via explorer where a directory is instead of using CMD or PowerShell to find it.
I’d love to hear any tips or tricks!
EDIT: I’ve been using Termius because they have a great Android client, but I wasn’t about to pay $5/mo for sync. Especially to sync to someone else’s cloud. Which led me to Tabby, which I understand has quite a large footprint resource-wise. But I guess I either don’t know enough yet to be mad about it or it hasn’t impacted any of my systems negatively yet. No Android client though, but you can bring your own sync solution and it has a handy little shortcut to SFTP to the current directory you’re in. Between that and stuff like ranger, it’s made it so much easier to learn my way around!
Take some bash tutorials on the internet there are loads of them
Learn rsync, it’s the best!
I’ve been a 20 year Linux desktop and server user. I spent my time either in an IDE for development, on a browser, or in shells. Last time I touched a graphical file manager has been years ago, if not decades. Cli shells are so so so so so much more efficient in getting shit done than GUI programs it’s not even funny.
Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies!
If you use Linux desktop (you should, it rocks, use KDE!) then install yakuake! It’s the friggin best awesome thing ever! F12 and 25 shells drop down on my screen. F12 and I got my browser back.
I just finished buttoning up my new PC build and installed Linux on it, actually. Pop!_OS though because I like the layout and it’s very un-Windows-like which is what I was after. I’m excited to learn more!
I find that zsh with plugins makes my life very easy. And if I need to quickly find something, fzf works wonders
if i’m not really sure what the contents of a given folder are, and i want to look into files as i go, i’ll often just open vim in file explorer mode
Pardon the ignorant question, but can you do that with a headless server as your target? I’ve not used Vim at all.
Yes, vim is a command line program.
If you look up “Cli file manager”, there’s a bunch that you can check out and try.
Tree, grep, and find are usually my three go-tos. Tree to get a general view of a ton of nested files/folders, then if I know a name I’ll use find . -name "filename", if I know a bit of contents, i’ll use `grep -re “content string” to find files containing that.
I recommend reading the man pages because you can often chain together these in fairly powerful ways.
