I have never practiced using the terminal. The only way I learned was using the terminal to do my tasks and fix things when they broke.

In the future, I hope to have a home lab/NAS running Linux

Just start this project. That will teach you about how to use the terminal in a practical setting

This website has a bunch of great practice “wargames”. You’ll learn a bunch about common linux commands and the different options for them. It also provides you with some great tips on what to google if you get stuck. I reccomend starting with bandit.

https://overthewire.org/

I’d suggest https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

Not specific for learning, but you can put any command into ExplainShell and it breaks down the individual parts for you.

In m opinion, practicing with real life problems is the best teacher. There are some ways to cut and convert videos, audio and images via terminal. Maybe there is still a way to enrich or streamline your workflow with that. Maybe a script which will prepare the folder of your next project. Also, xdotools let you automate a lot of sometimes tedious routines.

The Linux Experiment fairly recently made a video about this: https://tilvids.com/w/w5SrXQUhk1a5iEtE9xPWgS

If you just want the links:

• https://linuxjourney.com/
• https://training.linuxfoundation.org/resources/?_sft_content_type=free-course
• https://linuxcommand.org/
• https://cmdchallenge.com/

I also recommend learnlinux.tv and especially the YouTube channel

Since you’re on Arch, the Arch Wiki is a great resource if you ever need to look something up. If you just want to improve your CLI skills and make the life in the Terminal more pleasant, I’d recommend the fish shell. (Check this out if you want a video demonstration) It has a great autocomplete feature and shows you a short description of each command, which might help you to learn more about it. It’s also very flexible and customizable. (Check out this video for some neat tricks) My last recommendation is tldr, it’s a very useful application that gives you a short summary of how to use a command. These summaries are much easier to read and understand than manpages. I assume you know about manpages, if not, that’s another recommendation.

As many here have said, but I will emphasize: learn the Bash programming language. Linux Survival is a very good start, and you can just start experimenting right away in your own terminal on your own computer.

To go more in depth, you can read through the manual on your computer by typing “info bash”. The Info documentation browser is a command line app. You may need to install it using your package manager (“apt-get” or “pacman” or “dnf”).

In the “info” app, you can navigate with the arrow keys, pressing enter on hyperlinks, typing l (lowercase “L”) works like the “back” button in a web browser, typing r (lowercase “R”) works like the “forward” button. Info also lets you search the index by pressing i (lowercase “I”) then entering your search in the prompt, or search the full text by pressing s and entering your search in the prompt. And q quits back to the command line prompt. “Ctrl-Z” pauses the “Info” app and drops you back into the command line, and you can resume your “info” session using the “%” (percent sign) command.

Another thing that can help is to learn about the GNU “Coreutils”, this is a suite of commands usually installed into /usr/bin or /bin which provides helpful command line utilities. These are commands like cat, wc, sort, cut, ls, du, cp, ln, chmod and many others. Read through the Coreutils Info manual by typing “info coreutils”.

And I will also reiterate recommendations from others: learn how to use Vim and/or Emacs. Vim has the more difficult learning curve but is extremely useful for writing scripts. Emacs is better though because it lets you split-screen with manual pages, and copy-paste commands between Man pages, “Infodoc” documents, the shell, and/or a text file, all using only keyboard commands. I think it makes it much easier to learn since everything is integrated together. Ask the Emacs community how to get started if you are interested.

I think you might like DIstroSea. If you’d like to persist your experiments, then likely learning how to emulate systems with QEMU or VirtualBox (the latter if you’d like a friendlier GUI-led experience, the former if you want to go full-CLI virtualization). QEMU is great in how lightweight and easy to create and discard self-contained VM disk images can be.

IMO the best knowledge comes from doing practical examples that actually interest you. I wouldn’t rush that.

As many people have already said, just do what you need to do. That’s the best way to learn. But if you are afraid you’ll break your system with dangerous commands, use docker or a virtual machine for practice.

Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you’re not really learning “Terminal” so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like “Bash examples” to get a feel for it.

If that’s too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash’s manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they’re aimed at someone who’s already somewhat competent.

Anyway, here’s one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/

If Bash isn’t what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don’t think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.

To check what shell you’re using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.

Finally, a bit of advice: Don’t go running commands you see on the Internet unless you’re sure what they’re going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don’t know or trust - I can’t vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It’s possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.

Cost: $10

One year of a small vps. Fiddle around with it, get it secure, run some services on it, flatten and reinstall through the web kvm when you fuck up.

Look at your logs and be terrified at how many computers are just out there poking and prodding at random ips on the internet.

Say “I’m in” and push play on squarepusher when you log in.

Try to avoid using any file manager (uninstall them all if it is difficult to avoid running them). So you will practice in using file manipulation commands.

Cmdchallenge is similar to Linux survival. But is mostly command line basics like moving around directories, searching, etc. It also gives a list of solutions that people have used for each exercise, which is interesting just to see different ways of doing things.

https://www.thc.org/segfault/