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GNU/Linux Terminal Articles
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HowTo Geek ☛ How to Add Terminal Completion to Your Command Line Apps
Auto-completion is a great way to make your own tools more accessible. Find out how to take the first steps by building a simple Bash and zsh auto-complete script.
Autocomplete—found everywhere from text messaging apps to IDEs—can seem like a fairly modern innovation, but it’s been present in various forms of Unix since the early 80s, if not earlier. Linux shells like bash and zsh support a completion ecosystem that is more powerful than you might expect.
You probably use tab completion most often with commands and filenames. Command tab completion works by inspecting the PATH environment variable to identify available commands beginning with the letters you’ve typed. Filename completion will supply the rest of a file path (absolute or relative) and help you to narrow down your options, resolving ambiguities as you go. Both will save you a lot of time and manual typing.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Never Used the Linux Terminal Before? Here's How to Get Started
Whether you're curious or need to get something done, if you're on Linux, sooner or later, you're going to have to deal with the terminal. It's not so scary. Here's how to get started on the Linux command line.
Why the Linux Terminal?
While modern Linux systems have graphical interfaces that can compete with Windows and macOS, a lot of useful work is still done using the terminal.
The main reason to use the terminal is that it's often faster than calling up a separate graphical program. Terminal-based programs are often easier on your machine, particularly if you run intensive operations like crunching video and images with FFmpeg and ImageMagick. You could launch a full image or video editor, but why bother when all you wanted to do was a few quick resizing or conversions?
You can combine them easily into pipelines, which I'll demonstrate later, feeding the output of one command into the input of another.
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XDA ☛ This weirdly named tool makes the Linux Terminal less terrifying
When using Linux, you're bound to fire up a terminal session at some point. Whether it's to dabble with some commands to see how you fare, learn something new, or troubleshoot an issue that the GUI is unable to assist with. Although many would love to believe you can solely use Linux without touching the command line interface (CLI), that's simply not the case, even in 2025. Thankfully, there are some cool tools available to help you should you encounter the dreaded terminal.
Enter uwu, no, not that "uwu." Uwu is a free command-line assistant powered by large language models (LLMs), the same technology you'll find behind ChatGPT and other helpful interfaces. Uwu uses an LLM to convert natural language into executable shell commands, essentially allowing you to communicate with your Linux installation with more humane input. This alone can revolutionize the way beginners interact with Linux and underlying subsystems, making it easy to go from zero to hero.