Rough Guide to Unix command line.
Similar to other operating systems it is possible to get common tasks done using graphical interfaces, however for advanced use it may be necessary or beneficial to use the command line.
If you are using the command line in unix for the first time it might be useful to know some of the commands to allow you to do something...
Most common commands - lesson 1
These are probably the most common commands for doing the most basic tasks in your system... start a terminal and experiment with these.
ls list contents of current directory cd change directory more show contents of a text file on screen exit exit the current session cp copy rm remove (dangerous) rmdir remove directory (only if empty) mkdir make directory man gives documentation for commands (e.g. man man) ps process snapshot - list of jobs running on your computer
Example usage: try typing these commands
man ls ls . ls / cd / cd ~ more .bashrc cp .bashrc .bashrc_backup man rm rm .bashrc_backup mkdir trash rmdir trash ps
More commands - lesson 2
As you saw in the manual pages the above commands can be modified using
ls -1 lists contents of directory using a line for each result ls -t lists results in order of modification time ls -l gives more details ls -lh more details with files sizes in a Human readable form ps aux very verbose list of jobs running cp -R dir1 dir2 copy directory 1 and contents to directory2
Some other useful commands
whoami tells you information about youself who says who is logged into the machine find lists all files vi very light-weight ubiquiteous text editor (use :q to exit) less another program for looking at text files cat a program that dumps the contents of a file to the terminal emacs heavy-weight text editor pico simple light-weight text editor
Links
Of course other people have already written guides to learning unix for the first time, this one seems a good reference:Learn Unix in 10 minutes.