Hey, I'm a Linux user and that everything-free mindset drives me crazy! (That's why I like Gnome: It is much more friendly to people who don't use the GPL license).
The platform (particularly Ubuntu) is getting a lot of positive attention these days, and it may get an interesting market yet.
Some people just use Linux because the platform itself is free. (Or because it's faster, which is usually what happens if it is not a heck of a lot slower). I use it as my environment for programming now, so the more Linux-happy libraries the better.
Unfortunately, I lost my extensive post detailing Bash :(
The tilda character is just a shortcut for "your home directory". Instead of tilda, you can write /home/josh.
When it does the "<" thing in the input line, it is asking for more input. The apostrophe character (`) works like parentheses in an equation.
It calls the command within apostrophes first, passing its output to the next command in the list. For example, "kill `pidof aprogram` " gets the output of "pidof aprogram", then passes that to "kill" (which kills a process, passed to it by its process id).
This means it is always going to expect a closing apostrophe, so if you type "kill `", you will see the ">" again, asking for more content until you close that apostrophe (or hit Ctrl+C).
The continue line character you did by accident is a nice little way to spread stuff out over multiple lines. Continue line, and the new line, is both silent. (Just decorative).
If you want multiple commands called in order, end each one with a semicolon. That way, you can have some complex scripting going on.
Bash does some loops, logic and fun stuff like that, too, but I do not have much experience with them. (I also can't help you much with that script you want; I am used to another, less intelligent shell that has really horrible scripts).
Here is a big but quick guide, though:
http://www.panix.com/~elflord/unix/bash-tute.html
The platform (particularly Ubuntu) is getting a lot of positive attention these days, and it may get an interesting market yet.
Some people just use Linux because the platform itself is free. (Or because it's faster, which is usually what happens if it is not a heck of a lot slower). I use it as my environment for programming now, so the more Linux-happy libraries the better.
Unfortunately, I lost my extensive post detailing Bash :(
The tilda character is just a shortcut for "your home directory". Instead of tilda, you can write /home/josh.
When it does the "<" thing in the input line, it is asking for more input. The apostrophe character (`) works like parentheses in an equation.
It calls the command within apostrophes first, passing its output to the next command in the list. For example, "kill `pidof aprogram` " gets the output of "pidof aprogram", then passes that to "kill" (which kills a process, passed to it by its process id).
This means it is always going to expect a closing apostrophe, so if you type "kill `", you will see the ">" again, asking for more content until you close that apostrophe (or hit Ctrl+C).
The continue line character you did by accident is a nice little way to spread stuff out over multiple lines. Continue line, and the new line, is both silent. (Just decorative).
If you want multiple commands called in order, end each one with a semicolon. That way, you can have some complex scripting going on.
Bash does some loops, logic and fun stuff like that, too, but I do not have much experience with them. (I also can't help you much with that script you want; I am used to another, less intelligent shell that has really horrible scripts).
Here is a big but quick guide, though:
http://www.panix.com/~elflord/unix/bash-tute.html