LINUX for Beginners | GFG x Itversity

hi everyone good evening how are you all i'm dhwani from geeksforgeeks and i will be the host for today's session so today marks the first ever collaboration event of geeksforgeeks and i diversity and we'll just wait for a few minutes so that some more people can join in and we have a very special guest with us today and i'm sure he has a lot to tell us and we all have a lot to learn from him we'll just wait for two minutes till that time kindly confirm in the comments if i'm perfectly audible to evolve just give a thumbs up in the chat if i'm perfectly audible to you all so our today's guest speaker is mr durga who is the ceo and founder of i diversity and the cto and co-founder of analytics hello durga sir it's a really privilege to have you here with us how are you yeah i'm doing good how about you and it's privileged to uh to be the speaker of this session thank you so much sir i am well too we have a lot of audience today and i'm sure everybody is more than willing to learn so much from you so sir i would like to take up this opportunity to welcome you to introduce yourself sure so my name is durga i have close to 20 years of experience in it um i started my career as a java developer then i got into data related projects and over a period of time i have worked in vast area of technologies and i'm pretty uh means i have built the skills required both from the platform perspective linux is more relevant when it comes to the platform and also i have worked in application development as well as data engineering uh so as of today these three are the prominent roles platform engineer devops engineer application engineer software engineer data engineer these are the uh actual roles on job and linux is important for all three over a period of time i have mastered in linux as well and today i want to what i want to be a little bit specific around linux that's why i'm emphasizing on this if you wanted to know more about me you can actually visit my profile and you can know more ah and as of now i am running two companies as dwani mentioned uh for one i am the founder it university which is a training and staffing organization uh if you are interested uh to to be associated with us to get training at affordable cost or free and also assistance related to staffing you can reach out to us at it university in parallel i'm also running a company called as analytics which will be a data services boutique we'll be primarily focusing on data related services on top of cloud and for that company i am a cto right thank you so much sir uh we have a lot of comments in the chat the people who are saying hi and welcome to you so without further ado without further ado let's just start with the session so since today's session is based on linus and from what i have learned getting started with linux is a separate thing first we should know what operating system is so sir can you tell us what is an operating system and explain its functions yeah before getting into the details about the operating system first you need to understand what a computer is without understanding what a computer is talking about operating system is not that what we say is not that clear when it comes to the understanding when it comes to a computer it is nothing but hardware you will have a motherboard but motherboard is just to install few components on top of it if you ask me about the core components of the computer they are nothing but cpu which actually does the processing memory and hard drive okay so these are the hardware components on top of it you will also have additional companies such as networking and network devices and all of them will be installed on motherboard now you might want to use your computer for multiple purposes it could be listening to songs or on daily basis you might want to use your computer for work like that you might want to use your computer in several ways so to facilitate you can use these hardware components you need to install some software on top of it the first software which you will be installing on your computer is nothing but operating system on top of it you will be installing additional software such as mp4 players to listen to songs or watch videos office to actually create word documents uh install browser to actually access the internet and all those things in most of the cases browser comes out of the box with operating system in some cases especially in operating systems such as linux you will not be getting these fancy graphical user interfaces which you are seeing as part of windows because linux is prominent in deploying applications applications such as gmail whatever application you are using um are actually hosted elsewhere and those are actually hosted on linux and you don't find browsers and all out of the box there but you will be using for other purposes based on that we install whatever is required so operating system is the first software which will be installed on hardware which will facilitate you to perform whatever tasks you need to perform on daily basis right so what are the most trending and the popular operating systems and which one do you personally believe is the best one to work on so when it comes to day-to-day usage windows is the market leader followed by mac apple computers are being sold across the globe and it is also having a decent amount of market cap so for daily usage such as listening to songs or editing videos if you want to be a artist or just use it as a interface to work with other projects typically use windows or mac based computers these are the most popular ones but when it comes to the application deployment typically we prefer linux so linux is the one which is used to deploy the applications on top of it our applications such as gmail or even if you are using a card flipkart application might be running on a linux based operating system amazon might be running on a linux operating system all these applications which we use using our browser might have been deployed on linux there are other flavors of linux on top of these things uh unix used to be very popular but for the applications unix is not used that often uh these days most of the applications are being deployed on linux when it comes to linux versus unix if you are aspiring to be application engineer or devops in your irrespective of that there are quite a lot of similarities between the two actually linux is a flavor of unix itself so so to answer your question precisely windows or mac for day to day regular usage for application deployment linux followed by unix one more thing even windows are is used quite extensively to host windows based applications but market cap is a lot a lot more towards linux compared to windows when it comes to hosting the applications exactly that's what i was going to say actually i myself i'm a computer science engineering student and i started my you know like years with windows and my friends actually instructed me to move to ubuntu and i can see the kind of difference there is in hosting applications so i have a question that why is linux becoming so popular these days and what are your views on it yeah very good question um linux is quite popular for quite some time it's not new uh a few years back uh microsoft typically used to push windows for application deployment but seeing the popularity of linux they started supporting linux also in many ways azure which is a microsoft cloud platform they officially started supporting linux on top of it seeing the popularity of linux linux is already popular uh learning linux is becoming is becoming inevitable because irrespective of your role technical role you have to deal with linux day in and day out that's why learning linux is very very important as i mentioned to you earlier most of the applications are typically deployed on linux platforms that's why it is becoming very popular on top of windows and mac even ubuntu based desktops are also becoming popular so if you don't want to pay additional cost for the windows operating system these days most of the computers are giving ubuntu-based desktop on the computer and most of the kits are actually using it as well so linux have a wide variety of uses compared to windows or mac that's why it is becoming so popular right so sir since you mentioned it is most widely used and it is not something that has become popular nowadays so how important is linux for a computer science and iit engineering or non-engineering student and when should they start focusing on learning linux so there is a huge disconnect between the industry and the uh college degrees okay there's a huge gap the gap is due to several reasons irrespective of what whatever choice in the engineering irrespective of when linux is covered as part of your curriculum i would recommend to start with linux in the first year itself even if if i have to suggest my kids i'll search them to start learning linux in the holidays of plus one plus two or even after getting the admission into the engineering degree or non-engineering degree if he or she wants to pursue uh ite job as their career path then i would recommend them to be proficient in linux even before they start first in their college and earlier it used to be a challenge for people like us to learn i'm also from a below middle class families being from below middle class family i know it used to be very costly but now there are quite a few resources uh with just a few few hundreds or thousands of rupees you should be able to get required resources to to learn linux so i would highly recommend to start as early as possible once you start pursuing your graduation right so so for a person who does not have a linux based system how do you like how do you propose that they start learning linux and what is the minimum configuration that is required for setting up linux for practicing yeah so let me share my screen here and let me give a demo so that it is clear to you let me see okay it is asking me to open system preferences so just give a minute let me give the permissions to this i'm almost there okay it is asking me to quit and reopen uh okay let me try rejoining if you don't mind i'll be right back okay sure so till the time sir joins back let's hear from you guys what are your views on linux have you been using linux for a long time if not are you a beginner and are you looking for ways to get started if yes drop it in the chat and i'm sure you'll find somebody in the community who will be more than willing to help you to get started with it we would also be taking up some questions from the audience at the end of this session hello can you help me yes sir you're perfectly audible yeah so now let me share my screen okay please confirm whether you can see my screen or not yes i can see your screen so if you guys look at this i am actually using windows 11 if you are using windows based computer you just need to set up linux using something called as wsl it is very straightforward we will be providing the required details associated with the required details of the playlist which is associated with this live session as part of the description you click on it and you can actually get for step-by-step instructions about how to set up linux on windows if the video is not available immediately don't worry we will be making sure that that video will be added to the playlist very soon all you need to have is a linux setup on your windows using something called as wsl wsl is known as a windows subsystem for linux it is available out of the box with both windows 10 as well as windows 11. so this is nothing but windows 11 desktop this is nothing but search bar as part of the search bar i am launching the windows powershell if you don't see windows powershell you can always search here so let me say windows powershell now i i have launched in windows powershell as of now there is no subsystem linux running here it is in stopped state i should be able to start it just by running this command when you actually try to set up for the first time even if you don't have the virtual machine set up it will automatically set up and it will bring up the environment for you it is as simple as that to have windows on sorry linux on windows however keep in mind that it can be counter productive if you are using a very old laptop with only 4gb ram and dual core if you have modern laptops with at least 8gb ram with i5 and quad-core it will be fast enough you'll not see any disruption but if you are using a very old laptop uh using this approach can be a little bit counterproductive okay now you see i'm in the ubuntu based system within windows itself it's very simple to get started to check the configuration to see if we have required a configuration to explore linux on top of windows all you need to do is you can go to the task manager you should be familiar about all these things what is the task manager in windows and all once you go to the task manager uh you might end up seeing fewer details like this if you are not seeing all the details about your system if you if you have this more details option you just click on more details and then you should be able to go to the performance and you can actually get the details about cpu memory disk etc uh cpu should be at least four uh here when it comes to logical process two also fine but your system might become slow when you start ubuntu on windows when it comes to the memory you can see that mine is 16 gb in our case even if you have 8gb you are good to go if you are using mac you don't need to set up anything to get started with linux typically when we get started we'll focus on learning linux commands to just to get started to learn linux commands all you need to do is open mac terminal and you should be able to practice all the linux commands there will be some few differences but you should be able to easily identify solutions for those differences and practice using mac itself why mac works out of the box without installing any linux is because mac is also unix flavor like linux is a unix flavor mac is also unix level whatever commands we learn as part of the linux are related to both mac as well as unix so if you are using windows just set up linux using wsl and move forward by practicing all the required skills related to linux if you're using mac you don't need to install anything just launch terminal and take it further so thank you sir i guess that explained a lot of things to a lot of people and thank you for that you know like presenting a screen explaining it to everyone so what are the different job roles which are you know like available for linux users and is linux important to become devops engineer what exactly is devops and what other skills than linux and inspiring devops engineers should learn sure so when it comes to linux all the job roles in it where you are hands-on it is very important except when you are working on core microsoft technologies such as dot net c sharp etc where you will be predominantly working on windows based servers the market cap for those type of applications have reduced quite a lot most of the applications are being deployed on linux and hence irrespective of your it technical role it can be application engineer it can be devops engineer it can be data engineer it can be tester uh even uh business analyst also these days are expected to know a little bit of linux so any hands-on technical role uh expects some level of work on linux learning linux commands at the least will actually improve your productivity quite a bit now when it comes to devops engineer for others learning linux is highly desired it need not be mandatory uh except for certain roles uh in certain projects you might have to make sure that you have certain level of linux expertise but for devops engineer it is mandatory if you don't know linux if you learn whatever skills if you try to learn whatever other skills it it will always be half baked okay it is mandatory to learn linux you have to be really comfortable at at least with the linux commands then you will be able to learn other things so linux is foundation for devops once you learn linux to become devops engineer you also need to make sure you you learn server automation tools what are server automation tools as a devops engineer you have to deal with hundreds and thousands of linux servers for a given organization and all these hundreds and thousands of linux servers have to be managed seamlessly uh if if the server is down immediately someone should get notification even if some application goes down on a particular linux server someone should get notification and also it should not take time to install certain things on top of it so that's where server automation comes into picture uh the tools that are popular with respect to server automation are nothing but ansible chef puppet etc ansible is the most popular one on top of linux and ansible which is nothing but server automation you also need to learn cloud cloud is inevitable these days everything is going on to cloud you can start with one cloud platform and pick others aws is the most popular one and then you have to learn skills such as terraform terraform is uh typically used to provision servers from uh cloud platforms and then we use ansible or puppet or chef to take care of the server automation so instead of we buying the servers and then installing the operating system we use tools like terraform which is a ap code basic tool we have to write code we can automate the process of provisioning hundreds of servers with a few clicks of buttons or few commands and then we use the server automation tools to to set up whatever is required on top of it and then finally a small component which is important for devops engineers is uh building ci cd pipelines like azure devops or bitbucket pipelines or git runners these are the ones or jenkins is another popular one it's a very small component compared to others first linux for sure then server automation then cloud then terraform a small component but very important component is the ability to build ci cd pipelines using jenkins or azure devops and so forth so these are the key skills to become a devops engineer you can start as a devops engineer at entry level learning two of them one is linux and then either ansible terraform and over a period of two three years you should be familiar with all these five technologies or five set of technologies uh technologies inside these five in these five areas and then you will excel at the devops engineer right so so i usually hear about multiple linux shells so which one should i focus on yeah you don't need to worry too much about too many shells typically most of the when we actually provision servers from cloud they comes with bash by default you just focus on bash start running the commands and all to confirm whether you got bash or not all you need to do is you need to check your details as part of the linux system which are going to work once again let me share my screen here so that you understand what i'm talking about i'm still on linux on windows which is set up using wsl this have ubuntu 20.04 you can see the details here okay now i should be able to run command called as id to get the details about this user the username is nothing but this one we can pick this user and then we should be able to say grep represent primarily to search for a string in a file for each and every user there will be entry in a file called as epc passwd this is one of the ways to check the the shell that is configured for this user by default you see here bin bash which means the default shell is nothing but bash here also you can actually run a command called as env which will give all the environment variables which control the runtime behavior of the user sessions that are logged in now even in this you should be able to see the details about the default shell let me scroll up here there should be an entry in this as well you see here shell equal to bin bash which means you can also use commands such as echo then dollar shell which will give us the details about the default shell for a given user so as long as you have bash you are good to go you should be able to practice all the important linux commands there are other shells also like k shell c shell etc don't worry too much about those things to get started you don't need to break your head around those as long as you are using bash most of the commands which are demonstrated across the internet will work without any gaps right sir so uh i myself am learning operating system and what are the most common linux commands that a beginner should know of like what are the most commonly used ones and yeah yeah so typically again let me give a quick demo about some of the important commands i think uh i also have a demo planned uh yeah i think it is associated with this only i will actually give a quick demo about the power of the commands okay uh for this demo i'll be using mac okay so let me minimize this okay now i'm on mac now let me actually open my terminal this is mac terminal okay uh as i mentioned to you earlier uh whether you are using uh mac or unix or linux the commands will work as long as we are we are using the terminal here now some of the important commands are nothing but commands such as ls which will facilitate us to give the get the details about the files now let me actually say ls iphone ltr you can see all the folders and files that are there here on top of ls you can also use find command to find files based upon certain criteria you might want to find files based upon extension or you might want to get files based upon modified time or a period of time you will be modifying the files right if you look at the output of ls iphone ltr for each and every file and folder we have updated time you might want to see what all files that are updated since yesterday okay similarly if you have movies enabled system and if you want to find that movie file if you're not sure about where that file is if you want to find you can use the find command and you should be able to search for the files for example let's say i would like to find all the mp4 files that are there as part of the downloads okay so downloads folder here i can simply say find downloads which is nothing but path again don't get overwhelmed with these demos uh as part of the description will provide the playlist in the playlist all the comments are explained in detail you can follow those comments and you should be able to learn a little bit in depth of whatever is being demonstrated here just to excite you i'm actually using simple commands to show how how powerful linux is to get the information we are looking for okay so in this case i just wanted to get all the mp4 files uh which means the files with mp4 extension i can actually say hyphen slash name and then star.mp4 so in this case i am taking by name in the downloads folder with the mp4 extension now i can hit enter as of now as part of the download so there are no mp4 files let me pick some other folder let me pick this movies folder most likely as part of the movies i might end up having mp4 files let me pick that movie's hyphen name dot mp4 even this one doesn't have let me actually look for the dmd files dmg files are nothing but installable in mac i just want to see if there are any dmd files on my system okay let me identify what all i have yeah so let me get all the zip files okay you you see there are files with a dot zip extension let me get all the files with the dot zip extension i can just say find download cipher name then star.zip now you see there is one zip file okay if you wanted to get the size of the file uh you can actually pass the output to other command find is so powerful it is very important for you to get familiarity with find it actually helps you in troubleshooting many issues okay so in this case i'm actually passing the output to exec then i'm using another command called as do hyphen sh which actually get us the size of the zip file so in this case i can say do you hyphen sh whatever output is returned it will be password to this additional command called as you hyphen asset and you can see the size of it okay now if i want to get a size of all the files inside in sorting order to find the largest file as part of my downloads folder all i need to do is something like this i can say hyphen name and even remove this uh okay and now let me hit enter you see we got the size of each and every file i would like to sort them in ascending ascending order by size okay i'll be checking only for files file type and hence let me say hyphen type yes now one minute yeah now you see all the file sizes are displayed in megabytes i would like to sort in ascending order by name now i can actually pipe the output this is called as linux piping understanding linux piping is also important the output that is generated by this command is being passed to sort and i would like to sort by size uh by by making it as hyphen n uh i'll be getting the sizes in ascending order by uh sorry the files in ascending order size numerically you can see that this is the file which is taking most amount of storage it is taking 120 mb like this you should be able to search your entire file system and get the details so find the ls sort unique unicase primarily to get the unique values you can also use command called as cut to extract the information you are looking for there is another important command called as awk which actually facilitate you to filter your output or automate a few things around it uh du is another important command which which actually gets us the usage of our file system and most importantly you should be comfortable using piping method like this and you should be able to use multiple commands in tandem to solve the problem uh which you are working against uh understanding the all these important commands and then ability to using multiple commands at once to solve your problems is the key aspect when it comes to learning linux so i think that explains a lot to a lot of people so before getting into all these complicated commands and the system that you like you just show can you tell us what are some prerequisites and sources for somebody who's just starting to learn linux and you know like starting to install them in their system yeah as i have demonstrated earlier wsl is important um if you are using windows to set up linux quickly you don't need to pay anyone you just have to start with it when it comes to resources to learn uh you can actually come to a gigs for geeks or it ust and you should be able to go through the material out there and you will get lot of exposure to linux commands and on top of it after after a while after learning linux commands on one machine you might want to explore linux commands against multiple machines okay for example let's say you want to understand how to connect to remote machines using a command called as ssh ssh is also very important commander to connect to remote machines how to connect to how to connect to the remote machine via ssh for that you might want to set up a remote server uh so for that purpose you can leverage cloud platform as i have mentioned to you earlier there are quite a few free resources uh you should be able to use those free resources and learn whatever is required let me actually bring up my wsl now you see i'm in the wsl and also let me bring up this image for you okay if you look at this this is my windows pc where i have ubuntu also set up using wsl now using the aws and all you should be able to set up multiple ec2 instances like this for free you can see here i am actually running two easy to instances so these are the two instances so if you wanted to learn networking uh commands such as ssh which will facilitate you to connect to remote machines uh commands such as sap to copy the files from one server to another server in that case you can leverage the free tier of aws or even gcp gives you credits or azure also gives you credits you should be able to use those and you should be able to set up multiple servers and you should be able to start exploring the commands such as ssh let me see if i have a ssh command in the history you can actually search for your commands in the history now you see i am actually connecting to the remote machine using this command this is one of the machines which which is provisioned from aws now i'm connecting to the remote mission wire ssh and i'm running this important command called as hostname hyphen f to get the name of the host on the remote machine okay so in case if you want to get hands-on like this you have to have the remote machines as well you should be able to use a cloud platform such as aws gcps etc and you should be able to practice and these are little bit advanced but essential skills understanding ssh in depth is very very important also you have to make sure you set up a few additional softwares to to get understanding about let me yeah to get understanding about uh networking concepts let me see yeah there is one more tab here right so you see here uh you can actually experiment by setting up a database such as mongodb jupiter lab apache to the associated ports with them to experiment all these things you need to have additional servers aws or any cloud platform can come handy in that scenario once again i'm reiterating as part of the description we'll be providing details later to playlist you can visit that playlist and you you will be learning all these things in a structured manner right so so as you were just mentioning ssh can you tell us more about networking in linux for example using ssh for communication yeah so uh ssh is one of the one of the important command with respect to connecting to the remote servers you see here if you have to talk to the remote machine which is provisioned from easy to uh sorry aws or azure or gcp there has to be a ssh process running on it and whenever there's a process running on a remote server there will be a port number also associated with it okay for ssh the port number is nothing but 22 unless this ssh process is running on that remote machine you will not be able to connect to it in the similar manner if you want to host your web application or website you need to have a apache server or a secure apache server or nginx server or secure engineering server again the port numbers will be 80 or 443 unless you have a application server which can host the application you will not be able to deploy the application also there might be databases on the remote machines you have to connect to the remote databases on the remote machines one of the key is nothing but the networking now to validate whether networking is working between the server or system from which you are trying to talk to that external service uh there is one very important command called as telnet which will facilitate you to troubleshoot the issues related to networking for example let's say i'm not able to connect to the remote machine using ssh command i can actually validate whether 22 port is enabled on the remote server if the application is running on 22 port number or not using the simple telnet command now let me scroll down here let me go to my linux machine now this is the remote machine right let me copy this so telnet is the command which will facilitate you to confirm whether ssh process is running or not on port number 22 on the remote machine you can see that it is able to listen to port number 22 which means the application is running uh without any issues on port number 22. typically 22 is reserved for ssh only mostly ssh will be running on this port only if you are able to validate using telnet then you should be able to connect also without any issues like that you can also validate with port number 80 if application is running or not on the remote machine now you see i'm not able to talk to port 80 because there is no web application running on that machine now i can actually connect to the remote machine start web application open the ports in firewall then it will work as expected same is the case with the database such as mongodb postgres etc so networking is not only limited to ssh it is limited to most of the services that are running on remote servers even with respect to gmail also it might be running on some remote remote server you can get the details by just saying ping www.gmail.com then you will be getting the ip associated with gmail.com you see this is the ip you should be able to use this ip or even you can say www.gmail.com with the telnet and you can try 80 as well as 443 to see if http and https are working for gmail application or not let me give a try real quick telnet then www.gmail.com port80 you see it is working let me also try 440 443 is for https make sure you memorize these things 22 for ssh 80 for http 443 for https these are reserved once and you can see that it is even listening on 443 which means you don't need to enter any port to talk to these applications you can directly go to the browser and say gmail.com it will automatically connect you to the application if the application is running on other ports than atr 443 then you have to enter port also after the domain such as this but with most of the applications such as amazon.com gmail.com flipkart.com typically they'll be running on port 443 which is https and even if you say http column slash flipkart.com it will actually convert to https itself it is called as redirection of http traffic to https traffic typically most of the times all the standard applications are websites so we'll be connecting through https only which means the applications will be running on port number 443 so these are the some of the basics related to networking there's a complete series of lectures which i have covered all the basic networking concepts i will be uploading that video very soon as part of the playlist if you go through that lecture where you will see almost one to one and half our content you will understand all these basics related to networking with hands-on practice right sir thank you so i know a lot of students have already started working on linux as a part of their curriculum and because it's popular nowadays so can you tell me what are some of the most commonly made mistakes that students do when they get started with linux yeah so unless and until you you you have direction related to some r d type of work around computer science uh don't get fascinated too much about linux kernel and all don't get into those details you just work on basic linux commands spend enough time to practice linux as much as you can it will facilitate you to get used to all these important commands you have to spend a lot of time in practicing how to combine these commands to get the problem solved with ease it comes with a lot of hands-on practice by experimenting with a lot of use cases depending upon the resources which you have one of the common mistake what people do is they get fascinated with these advanced terms called as kernel and all i also go to colleges to talk to the students and i know the quality of the professors in the colleges many times not all but most of them failed to set the right direction for the individuals and when i actually went to one of the colleges for a workshop the lecture was talking about means the professor was talking about giving a presentation on kernel and then when i asked what type of operating system you guys are using when i asked the students they said putty party is not even an operating system party is just a tool to connect to the remote machines similar to whatever terminal we we are seeing here to connect to the remote mission party is used to be the most popular tool on windows to connect to the remote machines now we have better tools than party we don't use party that often they told party party is not even an operating system even professor is talking about party as operating system and if i try to explain kernel related concepts to them then they will go mad okay there is no way they can understand the kernel related concepts when they don't even know ls command to list the files mkdr command to create a folder find command to find for the files the standard directories such as slash etc wear log without the knowledge of these things getting into kernel doesn't make sense even if you are familiar about those things only when you are aspiring to be a phd candidate in computer science where you want to innovate by going very low level uh when it comes to computer hardware and operating system uh just learning basic linux commands and probably some shell scripting is more than enough don't do that mistake of uh carrying away with the kernel and don't spend too much of time on kernel unless you have the clarity right yeah one more thing is and another aspect is people think that they have to invest a lot of money that is one of the common mistake they end up buying a fancy laptop or they end up spending money on resources they end up buying expensive servers some people who are a little bit rich or ever made less they they end up buying expensive boxes uh with but a standard laptop should be good enough don't get too fascinated about power and all for commands you just need to have a 4gb or 8 db laptop with if you have ubuntu operating system directly on it if it is windows you just need to have 8gb laptop and then there are tools out of the box don't try to install anything to get started with linux you just focus on the commands right sir so are there any best practices that one should follow while learning shell commands it is not only with respect to shell commands whenever you try to learn anything with respect to programming or any tool or technology one of the common mistake what people do is they go to google okay google is one of the anti-pattern let me explain what is the anti-pattern because most of the uh audience might be entry-level they might not be familiar about a term called as anti-pattern anti-pattern means which is not supposed to be used which can be detrimental or which can be counterproductive for you okay which means it will be wasting a lot of your time so google is one of the anti-pattern you should not go to the google to explore anything to learn you have to fall back on to the official documentation and you have to stay focused observe and understand what is going on internally slowly and steadily you should build the capacity of getting proper question once you get the proper question you should be able to either go to google or go to your friends and get the answer now when it comes to the best practices just to go through the official documentation again let me share my screen real quick and show you how i typically learn uh not only linux but also others for now i'll be limiting the scope to linux i'm again in the ubuntu which is set up on using wsl on windows if i want to know more about ls command what i can do is instead of going to google i can select iphone hyphen help and i should be able to get the uses of this command okay this is the official documentation relevant to this version if you go to google and search for ls it will give the most popular answer it you don't know what on in what context you are asking the question okay for that reason you just go through the official documentation make a habit of reading the documentation try to understand whatever you can for a period of time your ability to interpret the information and learn will improve significantly on top of help there is also something called as man pages when it comes to linux commands you should be able to use man command and say man ls or whatever command you want to explore you will be getting the detailed documentation of the entire command in some cases you will also see the examples towards the end let me see when it comes to ls if they have examples or not with ls they don't let me actually man on grep for grab definitely you'll see examples okay they'll be if for some comments there'll be quite a few examples so just to observing the examples you will learn quite a lot also make a habit of understanding uh some of the keyword arguments sorry not keyword arguments some of the control arguments so what are control arguments for example already i have ran a command called as ls space hyphen ltr so ltr are nothing but control arguments for ls to control the behavior of the command okay for example if i just say ls it will just at least the files and folders you see here it is just listing files and folders now if i say ls hyphen l actually list the files and folders with additional details for each and file for each and every file and folder we are seeing these additional details by default these details are sorted by name you see it started with d then l then m then p after all uppercase it it have gone through lowercase characters right now instead of sorting by a name if you wanted to sort by time you can add one more control argument control arguments actually control the runtime behavior of your commands now you can see that the files are actually sorted by time you can see the latest one at the top oldest one at the bottom if you wanted to reverse it you can add r so ltr are the control arguments which you can use to get all the files and folders along with the details where the files are actually sorted our files and folders are actually sorted by time in ascending order like that you can also use yes instead of time t it will actually sort the files and folders by size you see the largest one came at the bottom if you want to understand these things one of the ways is you can actually say ls space hyphen hyphen help now if you actually go through some of the control arguments if you just go through these details even at the naive even if you're running the command for the first time at least out of these 20 30 options you will be able to understand two three options right so and also one of the good thing is some of the control arguments mean same thing wherever similar commands uh wherever we run similar commands for example in this case when i run ls iphone ls uh tr lsr we got the files in ascending order files and folders in ascending order by size but this is a little bit cryptic we don't know whether it is mb or jb unless and until we calculate right so there is an option called as h which stands for human readable format h stands for human readable format yes it stands for size r stands for reverse l stands for list the attributes okay now you see the sizes are in human readable format now even du command which we have seen earlier now yes for summary lowercase yes for summary which means it will summarize all the details and h4 again human readable we are talking about sizes and we might want to see the details in human readable format all right so du hyphen sh then dot is actually summarizing all the files and folder sizes and it will give us the overall size of this folder okay and it will be in human readable format as there are quite a few files and folders it is taking a little bit of time but what i'm trying to convey is these keyboard arguments are sorry not keyword i'm mixing up python with this in python keyword arguments are very popular these control arguments might mean same thing with respect to multiple commands and over a period of time if you learn these things for one command wherever you are exploring similar commands uh automatically they'll mean the same thing okay yeah now you see uh overall it is 12 gb if i want to get size of each and every file and folder in this location i can use charge of dot and you can see that the sizes are in human readable format h stands for human readable format t stands for time r stands for reverse capital s for size l for list so and so forth okay just to make sure you follow these best practices of going through the official documentation and then learn you should be good to go on top of it if you are from windows background typically in windows whether it is ls or ls or ls all are same all mean same but when it comes to linux it's case sensitive so when you actually transition to linux make sure you understand these three are different things and make sure you you practice based on that that way lot of hiccups in the initial stages will be easily overcome on top of it typically in windows we tend to use spaces when it comes to files and folders it is not a good practice to use spaces in file files and folders even though it is supported in linux i would recommend you to avoid having spaces in files and folders or any special characters in files and folders just use plain text and we should be good to go so just try to adapt to these some of the best practices to avoid as many hiccups as possible at the beginning of your learning stage right sir i mean this was something really i mean this i knew i i have worked on this thing and the the like hyphen commands that you were mentioning they really you know help in data analyzation better so what is the difference between bash on linux and msdos on windows yeah so all the operating systems will have command line tools bash is one of the command line tool in linux dos is a dos or powershell are nothing but command line tools on windows okay so even when if you actually go through the history of windows the first version of not windows but microsoft the first version of their operating system is dos not windows dos means it will just give a black screen like this and you have to run commands to interact with it even microsoft word uh microsoft at the time i don't think we have powerpoint but we have word and few other things i'm talking about uh 9596 time frame okay and we used to use the black screen even on windows so the black screen on windows is called as dos eventually it is evolved into powershell when it comes to linux it is a bash based one so on bash you will be able to use commands such as the ls iphone ltr to list the files so and so forth let me share my skin screen real quick and then let me walk you through so whatever you are seeing is nothing but uh bash okay because i am in the window linux operating system that is set up on top of windows using wsl now if i exit from here you see it says psps stands for powershell okay and i'm in the home directory of the windows system uh using powershell now if i say ls iphone ltr it will not work because ls is linux command just ls will work because they have introduced their less recently in powershell but the control arguments getting the help and all will not work on dos or powershell with respect to dos or powershell the important commands to list these files is nothing but dir okay whereas in linux we use ls iphone ltr so and so forth now when it comes to the abilities uh linux is a lot more advanced compared to powershell or dos they are trying to catch up with powershell instead of making powershell as capable as linux they have introduced wsl in the recent versions so that's where windows is also supporting linux officially and that's why you see wsl and using that you should be able to get into the linux and you can practice okay now if i use wsl let me actually say dia then downloads okay as part of the downloads i have these files and folders right uh now i'm actually getting into the wsl which is linux on top of windows i should be able to access all these files and folders that are there on windows even through this virtual machine visit which is set up on windows itself right so if i say ls iphone ltr there is a downloads folder here let me show the downloads folder okay now i can actually say ls iphone ltr on downloads you see whatever output we have seen earlier now is visible as a linux output so wsl actually facilitate facilitated us to run all popular linux commands on windows file system without any issues but traditionally windows used to have powershell again powershell is relatively new before that it used to you have something called as a dos you can also launch the search bar and search for dos here okay is also known as command prompt now this is a dos okay whatever you see as part of powershell also works for dos they they still keep dos as one of the app primarily for the reverse compatibility uh in this case dos and powershell will work almost in similar manner on windows 11. in earlier versions of windows there these two are different but they are closing the gap they are still maintaining the dos for the existing customers for the reverse compatibility right so so what is a virtual machine and what is the docker container and what exactly is wsl in windows yeah so as a industry have evolved instead of buying computers for everything they buy one mammoth computer big computer when it comes to the configuration of the computer the memory typically in our laptop will be 8 gb in most of the cases in some cases it can be 16 gb those who can afford expensive laptops in some extreme cases like me i have a 64 gb mac the memory itself is 64 gb beyond 64 gb uh out of 100 computers probably 0.1 percent will be having 64 gb majority of them will be having a db or 60 gb when it comes to the personal computers now when it comes to the computers on which applications are deployed instead of buying small computers like us the companies by mammoth computer are they provisioned from the cloud okay so when they buy mammoth computer you might end up getting 256gb ram and uh 32 or 64 or even 128 cores and when it comes to the size sorry hard drive it can be like 32 terabytes or 64 terabytes of storage now you can't run a very small application on that mammoth computer instead what we do from that mammoth physical computer we actually provision virtual machines virtual machines means uh smaller computers on a big computer which is predominantly based on software it's not hardware it's a virtual computer that's why it is called as virtual it's not real this will be hosted on those mammoth computers and it actually streamlines the process of spinning up multiple computers pretty fast otherwise if you have to buy physical computers for everything buying a computer is a big thing and on top of it you need to install operating system and you have to spend quite a lot of time to make it uh security compatible with the within the organization and all so virtual machine is disruptive in that sense and it started around 20 25 years back then come came the docker so even the virtual machines will facilitate you to create smaller computers out of a bigger computer uh to run applications uh if i have to shut down or if i want to spin up multiple virtual machines still it will take time so docker actually simplified that process further it is a lightweight uh virtual machine it is similar to virtual machine but it is much more lightweight virtual machine is not the right word there it we we term it as container uh now it it spins up much faster compared to virtual machines as of today the way the computers are set up in the organizations is they buy a mammoth computer then in that mammoth computer they will have eight eight or 16 virtual machines on top of those eight or 16 virtual machines they will be having hundreds of docker containers which will actually host the application so uh the main container is nothing but the physical computer then virtual machines within virtual machines we have the docker containers now wsl is ws wsl stands for windows subsystem for linux as windows started supporting linux very aggressively since they introduced azure they facilitated us to create linux virtual machines on top of windows easily using this wsl let me quickly share my screen once again okay [Music] now i'm outside the linux operating system on windows i can run wsl hyphen l hyphen v command to see what are the current virtual machines as of now there is only one virtual machine uh it is of flavor ubuntu 20.4 it is in stopped state there is also command called as wsl hyphen l hyphen hyphen online which will list all the different versions of linux that are supported on top of windows out of the box we have ubuntu ubuntu by default is nothing but ubuntu 18.04 on top of that we have these three flavors not only ubuntu operating system we also have suzy linux open open source susi kali linux debian these are the different linux flavors which we have and we should be able to set up multiple virtual machines using these these additional additional what we say distributions we have we can also have custom distributions and we can create custom virtual machines also wsl on windows is primarily to set up linux-based systems on windows quickly right so so i guess this will be my last question uh which what one should focus on after learning basic linux shell commands yeah so it's a very important question it all depends upon what you are aspiring to be irrespective where you stand if you are clear about your path if you wanted to be a devops engineer then after linux you have to focus on ansible or cloud you can start with one of them but you have to learn the other also either you can start with ansible and then learn cloud or you can start with cloud and then learn ansible after learning these two then you have to focus on terraform and then you have to focus on building ci cd pipelines all these five skills are inevitable over a period of time by the time you gain two to three years of experience in it you should be familiar about all these things to have a successful career in devops engineering if you are aspiring to be data engineer or a qa analyst or a business analyst or application engineer then after learning linux you have to switch to the application development related stuff if i have to select my kids after learning linux in the first year by the end of the first year if you're able to learn all the important linux commands in the second year if my kids have to be a application engineer then i would suggest them to focus on python as programming language or java as programming language or go as programming language once they learn one programming language on top of uh linux i would decide them to go with sql okay linux actually after linux i would suggest to go with sql then i would suggest to go with programming language by the end of second year or by the end of third year if they're comfortable in linux sql and programming language then in the fourth year they can focus on cloud in 4-1 and as part of the 4-2 they can actually get into a real time project to get to implement all these skills end-to-end and to to feel that they have achieved something over the period of four years irrespective of your engineering background you can follow this path you don't need to be a computer science graduate first year focus on linux second year focus on sql third year focus on programming language fourth year in 4-1 focus on cloud and try to come up with simple projects and see how you can leverage all these skills and build end-to-end application then you are easily employable or you can even be a entrepreneur where you can club your core skills uh core engineering skills with the computer science skills and uh eventually it might lead to an entrepreneurial path also so to answer this question yeah to answer this question it all depends upon the path you have chosen once you learn linux you have to decide what should be learnt next right so so before we close this session would you like to give a footnote to the viewers who have been watching this session for the whole hour and something for them sure so thank you very much for being patient and trying to understand as much as you can don't get overwhelmed with all the topics that are covered uh both gfg as well as i university are there for you to make sure we set the right path to excel in your future um uh i will tell you a small story around this uh especially those who are actually pursuing the college degree right uh in panchatantra there is a story about three fishes right somati kalamati and actual names are little bit different but in telugu when i read the translation talks about sumati kalamati and mandamati the meaning of sumati means kind of a good mind kalamati means spontaneous mind actually you can think about some of the other proactive mind kalamati is a spontaneous mind mandamati is a dumb mind so these there are these three fishes somatic kalamati and mandamati who are actually living in a pond and one one day somati were heard a fisherman thinking about catching all the fish and it went to their friends and told that okay we are at a risk they are trying to catch all of us it's better for us to go to the sea from here so that we are survived then kalamati and manamati kalamati said being a spontaneous mind he told we will see if he really come if you're really at risk i don't care at this time and mandamati just followed kalamati whereas after attempting to convince them it could not and it just go by itself into the sea and the next day actually the fisherman caught these fishes and uh kalamati acted as if it is dead and the fishermen dropped the dead fish into the water and it survived whereas mandamati got panic and it just started jumping up and down and the fishermen just banged on its head and it's it died now if you relate to this to your journey of becoming a graduate okay what are the characteristics of sumathi it actually is vigilant around what is happening and also it is prepared if it is at risk what would be done what what it should be doing right and uh it actually realized that okay there is a ocean somewhere else or sea somewhere else and we when it is when we are in risk we can actually go there and it also prepared to swim there right to swim to the sea it has to be prepared if you think from from its perspective it has to be prepared overnight it cannot say that okay i can swim there right it should have prepared over a period of time so from engineering first year one uh if you actually inculcate these characteristics of being smarty being proactive uh you can actually be vigilant about what is going on in the industry what are the key skills that are required to survive and you can be prepared and by the end of the fourth year you will be in a much better situation if you try to be a kalamati still you might you you might be able to crack it because you are spontaneous enough uh you might take your own risks but uh risks are risks if the fisherman is not dumb if he if he might suspect that this fish is acting then he would have killed that also right it is always a risk so even in your case if you just try to focus on that one night batting with respect to giving the exams and faking the uh not the experience but the skills and getting into the interview if the interviewer is smart enough he can get hold of you and eventually he will struggle to get the job but if you act as samathi and if you build your skills leveraging their four-year degree in parallel to your college degree in respect of what is going on in college then you will be well prepared and you will be definitely be able to get into the job which you deserve and don't uh ever try to be mandamati which means you should not follow others blindly okay if you follow blindly you will be at a very serious risk you will not go anywhere except going through the drain so that's the footnote which i wanted to share with especially those who who are aspiring to be engineers in next two years three years those who are already experienced definitely learning linux will add quite a lot of value it will be a lot more productive on your day-to-day job and it will get you a good work-life balance also okay so make sure you learn these essential skills such as linux sql even even if you are experienced and it will definitely improve your productivity thank you sir that was a very insightful and inspiring note i mean a lot of people have joined us and have stayed with us throughout this session and i'm look and i'm sure they learned a lot from you i personally learned a lot today i am just a linux beginner but i think i have some confidence with the basics now so thank you so much and thank you for answering all of our questions for those of you who are typing questions in the chat you can always connect with sir on linkedin and ask your questions personally to him i'm sure he'll be happy to answer them so thank you everyone for watching this session and thank you so much sir for sharing all this valuable information with us and have a great day ahead yeah just to conclude we we can also have another q a just to ask answer the questions related to the uh audience uh i will work with you to plan another q and a around the same topic in next two three weeks and we can take it further sure sir that works for us we'll you know conduct a survey where people can actually share their real-time questions with us because it's not possible to take questions in a live chat so i guess that's something we can look forward to so thank you everyone thank you so much so sorry to interrupt you so yeah if they if you are taking the survey definitely we can write a blog i will help you in getting the blog and we can circulate the blog to them so that all the questions are answered and also if even if they have some follow-up questions we'll plan something sure that works with us we'll get in touch with your team so thank you so much everyone and have a great day ahead sir thank you so much thank you bye