Comments by "JBird" (@jbird4478) on "100+ Linux Things you Need to Know" video.

  1. What he is describing is swap space, which in the Windows world is often referred to as virtual memory. That isn't that strange as the two things are closely related. Also, more colloquially the word "virtual" just refers to something that doesn't physically exist. Paging is what makes both virtual addresses and swap space possible. Basically, the kernel marks a virtual address range as missing and as soon as a program references that memory, the kernel gets triggered by the processor, and then loads the data back from the swap file.
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  2. That's just nonsense. If you can assume env is in /usr/bin, you can assume bash is as well. Neither of those are in any standard whatsoever, so it's just replacing one assumption for another. They are de facto standard, and so is /bin/bash, so you might as well just use that.
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  3.  @xrafter  It originally was created simply because the guys working on early Unix ran out of disk space, bought a new harddrive, and had to mount the drive somewhere. Nowadays in theory it serves the purpose of being able to separate the core system utilities from optional packages, but in practice it serves little purpose. On Arch /bin and others are just symlinks to /usr/bin and alike. I believe it originally just meant "user" and other meanings were invented after the fact.
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  4. You don't actually have to use the shell. Most popular distros come with a fully featured desktop environment out of the box, which isn't that different from Windows. You have a file manager, text editors, all sorts of graphical configuration tools, etc.
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  5.  @traveller23e  The linux console isn't restricted to characters (usually). Even without a windowing system the console is just a virtual character device on top of a graphical framebuffer. You can still run the classic VGA text driver, which assumes a hardware character device, but even then the VGA card is nowadays emulated. Linux will think it communicates with a VGA text card, but actually communicates with a piece of compatibility code from the BIOS.
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  6. No, it's in the order of the PATH variable - from left to right. The usual PATH on Linux is "/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin", with /usr/local/bin being for local system overrides of the distro's packages. The trick to add a directory in front is to do $PATH=/some/thing:$PATH
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  7. You could use uniq before sort but, depending on the file, that will give you a different result, because uniq only works on adjacent lines.
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