ifconfig is deprecated (use "ip" instead).
There is not much value in knowing vim if you know Emacs. If you want to edit something in your terminal, well, emacsclient -t to your Emacs session. Or use mg, which is a very fast and light Emacs workalike -- just enough for editing your /etc/apt/sources.list to get Emacs installed :)
Sorry you didn't get anything out of it, but I suspect you don't need tips like "learn vim" and "be familiar with chown".
'ip' just gives me the standard syntax description.
The power of the basic shell is that there's usually a few hundred ways to skin a cat. And just because there's documentation saying something is deprecated as often as not it's still so widely used that in practice, it's not.
We use chroot to support multiple web apps with their own ip/domain on a single box. real simple to just add a new /etc/sysconfig/network-script/ifcfg-eth#:# with the proper network config. We can then ifup and ifdown them as necessary, they come up on boot if the config is set...
Just always made sense :)
On RHEL and related systems, ifup, ifdown, and everything in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ are all implemented with the `ip` command.
'ip addr' should give you all the information that 'ifconfig' does. You can also make the output a little less chatty by doing 'ip -o -4 addr' to get IPv4 addresses on one line per interface, or 'ip -o -0 addr' to get MAC addresses displayed similarly. This can make awking / cutting for addresses to use in scripts a little more elegant.
Commands I use regularly instead of using ifconfig:
# link up/down
ip link set dev eth0 up|down
# add a new address
ip addr add dev eth0 172.16.43.124/24
# to clear all IP addresses from eth0
ip addr flush dev eth0
# delete an address
ip addr del dev eth0 172.16.43.124/24
# add default route
ip route add default via 172.16.43.254
Really not you. It's one way this site is too minimal.
ifconfig eth0 up|down?
This is the same reason as to why I hated that Linux decided to have an ifconfig for physical interfaces, an iwconfig for wireless interfaces. It seems redundant...
Anyway, the point of my post was showing some basic things which can be done with ip, and how to do them.
Nothing, as long as it's working for you (your Linux distribution probably patched some of the remaining ifconfig problems themselves). You likely won't have a problem until you want to use network features that were implemented after 2001.
ip a
ip addr
you also don't need root rights to use it for display - although ifconfig can be run as a regular user, it's not on the path by default so it usually won't show up.
I really don't understand why there is a need to throw out a perfectly good tool to replace it with something that is completely different and requires re-learning, and re-writing of scripts that are already using ifconfig.
As for the quick Emacs workalikes - they are exotic and you can't always be expected to know the packaging commands of the odd Unix system you happen to be working with. And sometimes installing new packages is not an option.
Deprecated by whom? Is there any source on this? Nothing is mentioned in the man page, and googling for it turns up a wikipedia article with a [citation needed], a reddit discussion from today linking to wikipedia, and this discussion.
There's also zile, another mini-emacs (great if you run Linux on small embedded computers.) I haven't used mg yet, so I don't know how they stack up against each other.
I do have a creeping feeling I should some day bite the bullet and learn more than 4 vi commands, though.