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!

  • tvcvt@lemmy.ml
    34·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I had the same issue at first and the more I used the command line, the more I started to prefer it to GUI apps for certain tasks.

    A couple things that I use all the time:

    • tab completion is incredible
    • cd - goes back to the last directory you were in (useful for bouncing back and forth between locations)
    • !$ means the last argument. So if you ls ~/Downloads and then decide you want to go there, you can cd !$.
    • :h removes the last piece of a path. So I can do vim /etc/network/interfaces and then cd !$:h will take me to /etc/network.
    • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlOP
      7·
      1 year ago

      Um…no. I’ll admit I didn’t know that was an option. Weirdly I do it all the time in PowerShell. Though I am using Termius right now and at least on Android it doesn’t support tab auto complete. That said, it does auto suggest as you type to get you in the ballpark. I’ll have to try it again from my PC once I get my office put back together.

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
        5·
        1 year ago

        Also make use of the up arrow on your keyboard, with which you can quickly reuse commands you have ran recently.
        For example you search for a directory with ls -alh in multiple steps, and when you have found the one you actually want to work in, then you once again press up, and either edit the command from ls to cd to switch to it, or just edit it to your favorite text editors command and put the file name at the end of the path. Tab helps with that too.
        Tab completion is done by the shell, not by the command you want to use, though worth mentioning that some tools install tab completion helpers your shell makes use of automatically.

        • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
          1·
          1 year ago

          It does not work on all terminal but you can also your the beginning of a command then the up key. It will show you only the previous command that start the same way.

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        Oh and then there’s ncdu too with which your can navigate your fs, but that won’t allow you to open files, it is for finding what takes a lot of space.
        The vim text editor can also let you browse directories and open files in them, when you pass a folder’s path to it. But that may be an extension now that I think about it… maybe tpope’s plugin loader does it? But maybe it isn’t so it’s easiest to just try it out

      • einsteinx2@programming.dev
        2·
        1 year ago

        I use Termius on iOS and double tapping the screen sends a tab (I may have enabled it in settings but I don’t think so). I think you can also put a button for it above the keyboard. In any case it does work for tab completion. I know I’m on iOS and not Android but I’d be really surprised if the Android version had no way to send a tab…

        • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlOP
          0·
          1 year ago

          You are correct, I just tried it. I have a keyboard on my Galaxy Tab S7+ and it will recognize the Tab key in normal text entry fields but doesn’t seem to work in Termius. The double tap is pretty clutch!

    • SnachBarr@lemm.ee
      3·
      1 year ago

      Why use a separate command when “cd -“ works just fine to take you to the previous directory

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
        61·
        1 year ago
        cd a
cd b
cd c
popd
popd
// you're now in "a"

        cd a
cd b
cd c
cd -
cd -
// you're now in "c" and need to manually cd to "a"
        • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
          2·
          1 year ago

          You mean

          cd a
pushd b
pushed c
popd
popd

          Right ?

          Depending on your shell, pushd/popd might not be an option. For a similar functionality, I like to use a subshell which is portable across all shells:

          cd a
$SHELL
cd b
cd c
# do work here
^D
# you're back in "a"
  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    Something I haven’t seen mentioned here is Ctrl + R on the command line to quick-search history. You start typing/backspacing and it shows the most recent matching history entry. Press Ctrl + R or Ctrl + Shift + R to navigate up and down through matching entries. Press Enter to pick an entry, Ctrl + C to cancel.

    • CoderKat@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Also, if OP is new, they may not yet be aware of aliases and functions. Generally you’d out those in a ~/.bashrc file that gets automatically executed when a terminal starts. They’ll allow you to save a more complex command as a really simple one. And particularly can be useful when things you want to run are in unusual directories. Eg, maybe you have a git repo somewhere that contains some project you spend most of your time on, so you could have an alias that just cd’s you to it’s directory. Git also has its own way of doing aliases and that’s really nifty for the more complicated git commands (or the more commonly used, like st for status).

    • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlOP
      5·
      1 year ago

      I saw that mentioned in another comment and I’ve been testing it out while I try to get Cryptpad installed on my VPS and its very nice!

    • Undearius@lemmy.ca
      3·
      1 year ago

      You can also make this the default behaviour as you start typing a command.

      Create ~/.inputrc and add these lines:

      $include /etc/inputrc

## arrow up
"\e[A":history-search-backward
## arrow down
"\e[B":history-search-forward```
  • orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org
    14·
    1 year ago

    • ls / cd for basic stuff

    • fzf if I want to find my way through the history

    • broot if I want to search for a file

    • ripgrep if I want to find a file with specific contents.

    I know that the last 3 are not available by default, but they are good pieces of software, so I’m just going to install them.

  • DrOps@feddit.de
    11·
    1 year ago

    I did 4 things, that helped me a lot:

    1. Make aliases for the most visited directories

    alias cem=’cd /home/drops/.config/emacs’

    1. Make aliases for moving up the tree tree:

    alias. .=’cd. . && ls’

    Three points for two levels up, etc…

    1. Name all directories lowercase, 3-5 letters long, and try to avoid directories with the same starting letter as siblings That way you can use tab completion with just a single letter

    2. Use the option to jump to subdirectories of /home/user from everywhere.

    • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 year ago

      Instead of aliases, I use variables that I set in my .bashrc.

      For example, on WSL I have export WINDOWS_HOME=/mnt/c/Users/username. Then I can just cd $WINDOWS_HOME. Or cp $WINDOWS_HOME/Downloads/some_file .

    • Ricaz@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Instead of aliases, I just have lots of symlinks in my homedir.

      I do have .. and ... aliases though.

      Mostly if I’m gonna work with files I just use ranger, or FZF from my shell to find stuff.

  • Coelacanthus@lemmy.kde.social
    11·
    1 year ago

    I just use ls, cd, tree and tab completion. Sometimes I will use rg to find files which contains specified string, and use locate to find files which I known name but path.

  • witx@lemmy.sdf.org
    9·
    1 year ago

    Not necessarily navigation, but ncdu will give the total size of your directories. It’s a simple but very useful tool

    • Father_Redbeard@lemmy.mlOP
      5·
      1 year ago

      Oh that is handy. I’ve been trying to figure out wtf is taking up so much room on my VPS that’s only running Miniflux and Wallabag.

  • exylos@jlai.lu
    8·
    1 year ago

    To navigate quickly between directories in ssh, I recommend you using zoxide as cd replacement.

    Zoxide remembers the directories you visited, then you can jump to them very quickly.

  • jernej@lemmy.ml
    7·
    1 year ago

    I use ls and ranger, to find files i use find -name and remember that * is used as a wildcard so you can use it when searching for stuff with in incomplete filename or when copying or moving files/directories. You could also use colorls to add some flare to your ls, and oh-my-zsh for syntax highlighting and tab autocomplete

    • nathris@lemmy.ca
      5·
      1 year ago

      I know there is probably a historical reason but I hate how find parses its arguments.

      Any other app would be fine --name or find -n.

      Every time I use it I have to spend a few minutes checking the results to make sure that it’s actually doing what I want it to do.

      • bellsDoSing@lemm.ee
        4·
        1 year ago

        That’s one of the reasons why the more modern fd is a nice alternative: it accepts command line args as you’d expect.

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        Also every other search program has the needle as a positional argument and either reserves a named parameter to specify haystack, or has the haystack come after.

        Apparently the find devs thought users would spend more time using it as an alternative to ls -a than finding specific files

    • palordrolap@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Depending on system, something like locate/mlocate might be installed, and is almost certainly available if the following seems like a good idea.

      Tools/daemons like them are quicker for finding files - basically because they index all files except those in specified places. (Or potentially only those in specified places depending on tool/configuration.)

      That way, rather than find -name 'some_wildcard_string', it’s instead locate 'partial_filename_match or locate --regex 'some_regex_string'.

      As for speed: locate / | wc -c returned 565035, the count of files currently indexed by mlocate on my computer, in 0.3 seconds. Quite a bit quicker than find! (locate / literally returns any file with a / in the full pathname, which basically means every single file in its DB).

  • slembcke@lemmy.ml
    7·
    1 year ago

    There are a few directory structures I have memorized, like my programming projects for instance. For everything else, I use the GUI. That’s what it’s there for. Mixing and match to get the best of both worlds. Some handy tips:

    • xdg-open will act like clicking on a file in the GUI, and is an easy way to open folders from the terminal when you want to browse them.
    • Use sshfs or even just whatever is built into your desktop environment to connect to remote servers and browse them
    • Most terminals let you drag files or folders into them to paste their paths
  • trompete [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    What file structure? I just put everything in /home and then try to vaguely remember part of the filename and glob *part-of-filename*.

    Ok, actually, every couple of years, I move all my files into a new directory, /home/old. I think I’m up to /home/old/old/old/old/old right now. I recommend using find to look for files in there.

      • constantokra@lemmy.one
        2·
        1 year ago

        You kid, but I just ripped a bunch of old data CDs and decided to also scan their covers and stick them in the tar.gz file along with the images. Some of them were pretty creative.

        • nestEggParrot@lemmy.sdf.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          Back when I started my dream was go have folders of DVDs of all things I would need. Luckily for me cheat fast HDDs became a thing. Still should burn atleast my favourite contents.

          • constantokra@lemmy.one
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yeah. I recently bought a tape drive to do just that. Turns out fiber channel hbas are harder to get working than I thought. First one didn’t fit, like physically the card was too long and hit the CPU fan power connector. Second one fit, but the computer wouldn’t boot. Third I get a driver error, and since it’s enterprise stuff the threads I find on it basically say ‘contact your vendor’. At least they’re really cheap. Should have spent the extra money for a SAS compatible one.