ok here's the deal

I grew up on CP/m

then moved to DOS for 10 years, than was dragged to Windows for Work for several years which I am still forced to do.

But I decided last year that every pc in my house w/ windows would be the LAST windows installation, as things were upgraded they would move to Linux. Because I had been "playing" with Mandrake since 7.1, since I got involved w/ MCNL in 2006 I've been moving whole hog.

So now I'm on 2008.1 w/ KDE4 and all the "joy" thats bringing.

HOWEVER, as I tried to perform a DSL (damn small linux) HD install last night I realized how FAR AWAY I and all my books have gotten from CLI.

For example, I bought a GREAT book from o'reilly on Bash Scripts, have 4 OTHERS from O'reilly on KDE/Desktop hacks,phrases ETC.

Sadly I found out last night that not ONE of them can walk me through a CLI partition and format.

Lucky for ME I have a CD that boots into QPARTED and that worked great, but I KNOW the FDISK and SFDISK could have done the same things, I just dont know HOW.

I had HOPED that running them from the CLI would do what FDISK DOS does, which is go out read the disk, present me with the options and I can select from there. And it MAY, but I havent got a clue on where to start!

So I would LOVE some CLI reference,. books are GREAT websites and test files come next.

PLEASE help me out.


[moved from Software by spinynorman]

Similar background (though I never worked with CP/M, but have worked a lot with mainframe systems when punch-cards or DECWriters were the norm). I found this book very valuable because it approached mastering Linux not from click here, click there, but from CLI with GUI-programs as optional. The book is ~5 years old: Linux system administration, Gagne (of Linux Journal fame). It probably doesn't cover everything but touches on a lot -- have look at Amazon for the TOC to see whether your areas are covered. Its mainweakness (due to age) is the dated and lack of coverage on desktops such as KDE, Gnome etc.

If on the other hand, if you only want to partition and format, use a lvedCD or something else to get gparted started. I use systemrecuecd.

how about rute
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

Yeah, can't complain, rute was pretty awesome last time I saw it.

The command line isn't really something you can learn easily by sitting down and reading a book. It just happens with time. You learn how to do the basics first... and end up looking up how to do other things as you need to from there.