 Good morning, Zoomers. So in this video, I want to talk about a concern that I often get either on my channel Or I often see just on the internet in the wild and that is a lot of people out there who are novices to Computers or are specifically to Linux or other Unix based operating systems They're often afraid of the terminal or they talk about the terminal as if it's pulling teeth like using the terminal That's what you do if you can't do it in the graphical interface That's the hard stuff. That's the stuff that I don't know. I'm afraid of and I don't want to do now I want to explain to you Well, really I think in order to Function well in front of a computer. You have to really invert this idea You have to understand that really it's the opposite of the truth in reality It is much more difficult to do things without a terminal than it is to do do them with it now Let me explain why Just as an example, let me give you a brief example one thing Let's say I'm in a directory and I'm using a graphical browser a file browser That is and I'm in a directory and I want to delete all the JPEG files. Okay, relatively simple idea Think of it this way. Let's say well nowadays. There are these things called I don't know what they're called voice butlers, you know, like Siri Google who will do relatively advanced commands for you just if you say them now I don't like these things just because they're like literally spyware, but um, you know, they are very convenient You can give a relatively abstract command and they will be able to do it immediately Now think think about the file browser. Let's say you want to delete all the JPEGs in a folder now If you have a graphical interface browser, usually how you do that is you would Manually select, you know control click all of the JPEGs Maybe you'd you know use the box to highlight some or something like that But you would gradually go through and highlight those and maybe there are five maybe there are ten But maybe there are like a hundred or something and that's sort of a pain But you can do it relatively easy you might be lucky your graphical browser might have some Option to say like select all of this file type, but I don't know how common that is But you know, let's say you could instead of doing that you could just talk to Siri You could tell he'll Siri delete all the JPEGs in this directory Well, in fact, you can't do that. It's called using the terminal now If you're in a terminal and if you want to delete all the JPEGs in a directory, you just type rm space star JPEG They're all deleted. That's it one little command now That's not an arbitrary command that of course is built into the logic of a shell But when you think of it this way, you know a graphical interface browser Really all that is is an indirect way of communicating with the operating system Whereas your terminal is a direct way of communicating that has Available to it certain abstractions like you know being able to delete all files that have this in their file name or something like that Another example, you know, let's say you there's a file maybe a really big file and You there's some data point, you know, there's some like sales for March equal whatever number And you want to find what that number is? Well, if you're using a graphical interface You know if you if your mindset is to use the graphical interface to do that You might open up this enormous file in some kind of text editor That might be really big and graphical and it takes forever for you You have to go search for the term or if you're just using the command line You can just basically do the equivalent of tell Siri. Hey show me the line with this You can say grep March sales of this file and it will show you the line with March sales So when you think of it this way the terminal is a kind of Siri It's a kind of hey Google kind of thing It can do relatively abstract commands and it actually makes things a whole lot easier once you start using it Now the same thing is true Let's say specifically about Linux, you know, sometimes people will ask me You know what I want to get a webcam for Linux I want to know is this compatible with Linux or da-da-da-da-da Well, let me go and tell you there might be some webcam out there that is not compatible with Linux But let's just say if it has a USB port or a USB plug-in it probably is now Some people will think about that using a webcam for example in terms of a graphical interface program What program should I download to have you know be able to use a webcam or something like that? But once you start using the terminal you start actually thinking about how it works on your system That is instead of relying on some graphical interface program to detect some webcam You know if you're a good Linux user that all of your video inputs are going to once you plug them in They magically appear in the file slash dev slash video and then a number so you plug in one webcam It's going to be slash dev slash video zero Second one is going to be slash dev slash video one, etc, etc So what you can do is you can directly run Let's say you want to Want to have a window of your face you can run your video player on that file and it will open up your webcam You don't need to rely on the graphical interface Or you could if you're if you want to record your face You could use ffmpeg another command line utility and you could direct it to look directly at that file slash dev slash video zero So what I'm trying to say here is that I think a lot of people I Mean for me not using the terminal is a big pain whenever I have to once you understand a system Once you understand generally how it works the using the terminal is the most direct way of talking to that system No matter what you're doing So whenever if you're someone like me who's sort of familiar with this kind of stuff When you have to use a graphical interface program maybe to do something on the internet because I don't I don't really know apis and stuff like that, but um You know if you have to use some graphical interface program That's a big pain because you're really what's really happening is you're telling the graphical interface program what to do And it has indirect option. You know it relates indirectly to what is actually going on It's much nicer to be able to give direct commands Now the funniest thing is to me when someone says something like well, I want to use Linux I want to use this Unix based operating system or I want to do I want to be a programmer I just don't want to use the terminal because saying something like that is sort of like saying, you know I want to go mountain climbing, but I want to do it with my feet tied together or something like that It's this arbitrary limitation, which misses the whole point of what you're actually doing You you are not playing around in the playground created for you by graphical environments You want to be able to really I mean you want to have that magical ability of Interacting with what is in effect a Siri a Thing that you can give commands and it will understand it Relatively direct commands and we'll do them immediately. You don't want your everything You do on a computer to be mediated by some kind of graphical interface program. So anyway, that's just my point I mean, I think maybe the terminal is frightening for some people at the beginning But once you understand the logic of it, which doesn't really take that long you get way more I mean there's you look at the other programs you use and you'd be like, well, why am I even doing this? It's so much easier to do it on the command line and really As I said before it'd be must much more Difficult for me to never be able to use a terminal than to you know go with you know have to use the terminal You know have the using the terminal is just called using the computer everything else is indirect So anyway, so that's about it. Hope you learn something if you're a newbie I hope this assuaged some of your fears and I will see you guys next time