Terminal trainer

bashcrawl

Despite its ubiquity, many of us forget how intimidating the command line can be to people who have never used it before. This is a tricky issue to overcome because this initial trepidation only dissipates with experience. But to gain that experience, no matter how much you've read beforehand, you need to do actual things with the command line. It's a vicious cycle, but it's also one that Bashcrawl attempts to break. Bashcrawl isn't really anything other than a collection of files and directories, but it's a collection that's been put together in such a way that what you need to learn for the story to progress is entertaining and could provide that vital first step for people who want to use the command line but don't know how. To start, you simply open a terminal in the entrance directory of the download. This directory contains a text file called scroll and another directory called cellar. The only instruction you have to start with is cat scroll, which will of course print the contents of the scroll file to the screen.

In this way, you begin your tentative first steps with mastering the POSIX terminal, first learning cat, ls, and cd, before learning how to create aliases and variables to hold values. These elements are then used within scripts to allow you to progress within the current environment, making the whole experience feel very much like a text adventure game built using only the commands that are already part of your terminal environment. The game is short but hopefully does enough to coax the player from within the relative safety of its directories, text files, and scripts and into their wider Linux environment, where hopefully they can start a brand new adventure of their own.

Project Website

https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl

Playing bashcrawl could be considered a little like playing Ender's Game.