// Command Line

Stop Fearing the Terminal.

No experience required. You genuinely can't break it by looking.

Almost every privacy tool and self-hosting guide expects you to type a few commands — not to show off, but because the terminal is where you get direct control of your own machine. This short track takes you from never having opened a terminal to comfortably reading the kind of one-liners the rest of the school uses. Each chapter is a standalone guide you can read on the web or download as a PDF.

Start: The Command Line, From Zero → View Curriculum ↓
// Course at a Glance
Beginner Self-paced An afternoon Free Prereqs: None — a computer and a little curiosity
// Who this is for

Is This Course Right for You?

  • Anyone who’s ever been scared off by a blank terminal window
  • Privacy 101 learners ready for the hands-on command-line layer
  • Self-hosters who keep hitting guides that assume CLI basics
  • People who want direct control of their machine, not just the three buttons an app gives them
// What you'll learn

Skills You'll Walk Away With

  • Why the terminal is safe to explore — and the only two commands that actually deserve caution
  • The ~15 commands that get you through every other guide in the school
  • Moving around, looking at and managing files, installing software, and editing config
  • Reaching a headless server over SSH
  • Streams: stdin, stdout, and stderr — the mental model that makes everything click
  • Redirection and pipes — wiring commands together like plumbing
  • The - convention, and a real capstone: pulling one file out of an encrypted archive without writing the rest to disk
// Curriculum

The Chapters

Part 1

The Command Line, From Zero

Your first 15 commands, reaching a server, and proof you can't break it by looking.

Begin → Part 2

Streams, Pipes & the `-` Convention

stdin/stdout/stderr, redirection, the pipe, and selective decryption from an encrypted archive.

Begin → Part 3

A Faster Terminal

Modern tools — ripgrep, bat, eza, zoxide, fzf — plus tldr/navi/cheat.sh so you never memorize a flag again.

Begin →

New to all of this? Start with Part 1 above — you genuinely can’t break anything by looking. Already comfortable moving around? Jump to Part 2 for the streams-and-pipes model that unlocks the dense one-liners in the rest of the school, then Part 3 to make your daily terminal faster.

// What's next

After This Course

Each chapter doubles as a downloadable PDF — keep them on the machine you're learning on.

Start: The Command Line, From Zero →