Bashcrawl: Learn Linux commands by playing a simple text adventure | Hacker News Reader

Bashcrawl: Learn Linux commands by playing a simple text adventure

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This looks neat. Once upon a time -- back in the 80s -- there was a utility called 'learn' that was a Unix command line tutorial. After each lesson, you could do these exercises where you were dropped into a fake shell, replete with fake directories and that, and had to get things into a certain expected state. They were typical business-related tasks, nothing cool and dungeon-y, but I learned my basic Unix commands that way. It's good to see learning tools like this re-emerge.

Reminds me a little of one of the games built into emacs... You ftp around and do other stuff that teaches you commands. Not positive, might be called dunnet.

Not a game, but smit/smitty[0] built shell command lines that you could review before running them.

It wasn't so useful for me, except for some ksh[1] eccentricities, but I imagine it was (and perhaps still is -- I haven't used AIX in almost two decades) quite useful for novices.

[0] https://developer.ibm.com/articles/au-smit/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KornShell

Oh come on, first room and I already learn something new despite using linux for years :D

  alias ls='ls -F'

I am going to spend some time with it, I hope the awk rituals are explained later on :).

edit: Maybe the author should provide a list of commands that will be taught ?

It's pretty well done, I almost forgot I was in my shell, and when the games gets to "tree to map the dungeon", I was almost surprised I didn't think about it before: I felt like playing a game, not coding in bash :)

"Then drag and drop the entrance directory from this folder into your terminal"

Kind of a funny way to start out a "text" adventure :)

It's for those not yet accustomed to typing shell commands.

I learned with Kano OS (kid's computer kit) running on a Raspberry Pi at age 12. A similar console-type game that taught me all the common commands still sticks with me to this day. This will be a good refresher, years later. :)

https://allthingsd.com/20131203/the-99-kids-computer-kit-kan...

Kano looks amazing. I wish it wasn't Windows even though I'm sure it would be a bad idea for most people to run Linux on it. But what a cool company. The peripherals are so cool.

Anyone know of a similar option for Linux based kids computer?

The original Kano Computer Kit is Linux-based! You can run it on a Raspberry Pi or purchase the Raspberry Pi kit. Personally I just flashed the OS on a flash drive. https://kano.me/us/downloadable

It's only the newer Kano laptop that's Windows-based.

Is there hardware for this one?

Nothing special. They sell a kit that includes a bluetooth keyboard and a case and stuff, but there's nothing particular about it, besides branding.

Ok. I actually could not find that, do you have a link?

This is still great, and thanks for sharing. I'm just looking for the perfect combination of durability, hackability and as free from commercial (ad vehicles) as possible.

It's gone from their store page, but you can find listings on Ebay and Amazon, as well as info on their help page [0]. As far as I can tell it was just sold as "Kano Kit" with a raspberry pi, bluetooth keyboard. (Kano Kit Touch seems to be another one they sell, with a touch screen; then there's the laptop they sell nowadays)

Not quite sure why it's gone from their homepage, seems to be discontinued as per B&H listing [1].

[0]: https://help.kano.me/hc/en-us

[1]: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1450064-REG/kano_1000...

However, I recommend simply buying a generic Raspberry Pi kit (usb power supply, kb+mouse, HDMI cable, case, etc) and just flashing Kano OS onto it. It's essentially the same experience.

> I learned with Kano OS (kid's computer kit) running on a Raspberry Pi at age 12.

I wish I had been able to use a Pi at age 12. :) I had a Commodore64 that I LOVED.

The terminal quest game on Kano was very clever, i wonder if there is a repo just for that somewhere?

Yep found it, that was easy: https://github.com/KanoComputing/terminal-quest

Anyone know the depth of information presented? Is there a list of commands that are covered?

Is this fun?

I played around with it for 5-10 mins and found it pretty fun.

I think this is a great idea.

That being said, I think it's a bit too advanced for someone with no CLI experience whatsoever.

It would be great if this could be combined with a codecademy type thing so you can have clear instructions on the left and a terminal on the right.

This is the future of learning anything. I would rather play an engaging game than read 300 pages of text book and still has to Google for doing anything meaningful.

I can't learn anything really new to me by simply reading. Very much a hands on guy. School was hard. But not everyone is like that and while I agree that learning should be fun, I would very much like to not force what works for me on everyone else.

One man's fun is another man's nightmare

It is like video and text. Text is so much denser and invoke your mental process. But seeing dune vs reading dune. No ether or I guess. Education process should tailor for individual. In ideal situation…

Shameless self promotion: if you don't want to learn bash you can instead use this tool to get the bash commands directly from natural language, right in the terminal: https://github.com/davidfant/terminal-x

nice!

It's interesting. It failed on "x git reset last commit" but returned "git reset --soft HEAD~1" for "x reset last commit".

It is genius. But also since the "action on objects" is based on executing files, should not be the first command a `chroot` - just to put the learner in the right mindset?

How do you kill the robot? I keep getting electrocuted.

how do i get the treasure... it only teaches me ls and cd?? im at the end of the hall

The instructions are in the armoury.

cat cellar/armoury/scroll

Also requires Perl.

It's one thing that so many people who really should know better call anything Unix-y Linux.

Now we're completely going the whole way and calling macOS Linux, too?

It's pedantic, I know, but when I see this, I can't help but imagine the person who chose to use the phrase "Linux commands" doesn't really know what they're doing.

maybe call them “linux-compatible” ? (:

> This is a game to teach you the basics of using a POSIX (Linux, BSD, UNIX) terminal.

Second line of the README.

You're not the target for this.

If you just installed your first Linux distribution, don't know anything about the command line, you're not going to click on something called "Learn POSIX shell...".

You did see the title, right?

> [...] the person who chose to use the phrase "Linux commands" doesn't really know what they're doing.

I'm quite certain they know pretty well what they are doing. To catch people's attention, you need to use "their" language. People will search for "linux command" more often than for "posix command". And it's totally fine to use that in the description, just to make it more precise in the Readme.

To be fair, the README does make it more general:

> This is a game to teach you the basics of using a POSIX (Linux, BSD, UNIX) terminal.

I'm fine with being pedantic. However, they _are_ "Linux commands", they're just not exclusively so (and no, I'm not going to get into 'but Linux is a kernel ...').

It's like having 'a guide to kitchen tools' and you complain that cleavers are also used outside kitchens -- for sure, but they're still "kitchen tools".

A lot of people won't be using a POSIX shell, XNU is what it says it is, ... what are you going to call it? 'Linux-like commands'? You're going to lose a load of learners who are looking for 'the command line, y'know, linux' rather than something that's not it but is like it.

Kinda a premature specification.

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