A lot of people still see the Linux command line as something complicated, intimidating, or reserved for hackers.

So I decided to test that idea on my daughter.

She had no idea what I was going to show her. Instead of starting with permissions, filesystems and serious system administration, we started with cows, dragons, fortune tellers, Matrix effects, fake Hollywood hacking, terminal games and a small treasure hunt.

Along the way, she also learned some real Linux fundamentals:

• navigating directories with cd and ls
• command history and tab completion
• pipes and output redirection
• creating files and directories
• using cat, echo, touch and chmod
• running programs from the terminal
• installing software with apt
• writing and running a simple shell script
• looking at the system with htop, whoami and uptime

The point wasn't to turn a child into a system administrator in one evening.

It was to show that the Linux terminal doesn't have to be scary.

You can learn real concepts while playing with cowsay, cmatrix, moon-buggy, ninvaders and ridiculous terminal commands.

And perhaps that's a better introduction to the command line than memorizing a list of commands.

This video is completely unscripted. My daughter didn't know what I had prepared or what I was going to ask her to do.

Linux can be serious.

But it can also be fun.

00:00 Is the Linux command line only for hackers? 01:18 cowsay: Making Linux terminal commands fun 03:14 Tux and dragons with cowsay 04:28 figlet: ASCII art in the Linux terminal 05:44 fortune: Linux fortune cookies 06:39 Linux pipes explained with fortune | cowsay 08:00 cmatrix: The Hollywood hacker terminal 09:04 Writing our first Linux shell script with nano 10:28 ls, chmod and making a script executable 12:25 Running a Linux script with ./ 13:26 cat: Reading files from the command line 15:23 Hollywood: Becoming fake movie hackers 16:06 Installing software with sudo apt install 19:30 Writing a second command line program 21:36 ls vs sl: The famous Linux steam locomotive 23:14 mkdir and creating directories in Linux 24:18 cd and Linux tab completion 26:05 touch: Creating files from the terminal 27:18 echo and Linux output redirection 30:03 Linux command line treasure hunt 31:12 Learning ls, cd and cat through a game 35:50 Was navigating the Linux terminal difficult? 36:06 moon-buggy: A game inside the Linux terminal 38:27 ninvaders: Space Invaders in the terminal 40:41 htop: Watching what your Linux PC is doing 42:08 whoami: Who am I on Linux? 43:28 uptime: How long has Linux been running? 44:04 The wonderfully useless yes command 44:50 Rolling dice with Bash and $RANDOM 46:30 toilet: More ridiculous terminal text effects 48:53 So... was any of this actually hacking? 49:42 Should kids learn the Linux command line? 50:12 Why I still like old-school unscripted YouTube 51:24 Final verdict

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