UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

I am fairly new to *nix/linux and I have just installed SuSe 8.2. I am wondering what skills would be good to learn. I know that I will need to learn how to write scripts, but what scripting languages should I learn. I greatly appreciate any and all comments.

Thanks

As far as scripting goes, I would suggest that you teach yourself KORN shell.

I find KORN to be somewhat of a forgiving language....which is nice for a beginner like myself. KORN is also quite versatile as it allows to interact with shell commands and also embed sed/awk code.

My 2 cents.

Al.

i would advise you to begin with "normal" shell scripting (bash: is the most common and nearly similar to sh)

some nice URLs:

http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/

http://steve-parker.org/sh/sh.shtml

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/

I began with sh-scripting and then i bought a book about perl (easier to unterstand when you can sh-scripting)

Yes, especially because SuSE gives you bash by default. I believe korn shell is not even installed by default, so for a new user who are still not familiar with how to install additional software RPMs from the 6(?) CD set very likely a korn shell is not for him/her.

The SuSE manuals are considered among one of the best introductory guides in all Linux documentation. I have a set of old (7.2) manuals lying around and find that you can learn quite a good deal from them. Starting with a GUI is easier, but don't forget to learn command line (e.g. bash) also as you proceed! The SuSE manuals do not teach you these things, though.

Thanks for the advice. I'll check out the links and I think I try to start with bash shell scripting.

sh, sh, sh

The Bourne shell (usually /bin/sh) is the only shell universally available. Some systems don't install csh (which no one has recommended yet). Bash is convenient and ksh-like (with enhancements?). Zsh is what I use for a UI. But I always script in sh.

If a problem is too complex for sh, I drop into ruby or perl, but that's a different level of complexity.