Linked by Richard Wareham on Mon 8th Mar 2004 20:49 UTC
This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them.
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I would also introduce students to lynx and irc on the command line. And like you, I would use pico (actually, the open source clone "nano") for text editing, but watch out for automatic line wrapping. Later you could show how to make an alias for "nano -w".
cd, cd .., cd ../folder
ls, ls -la
mv, cp, rm, rm -R folder, mkdir, rmdir
Some commands to find info about the system (free, du, ps, ...).
.login, .tcshrc, etc. shell scripts
chmod 700/644/755, chown, sudo
wget or curl for downloading stuff from the net (very important), along with tar xzvf and tar czvf
./configure, make, make install
apache web serving, .htaccess, htpasswd
That's like 95% of what most people use.
I agree, "man" is usually not very much help at all. I hate how they virtually never include an actual example of using the command.