Linux basic commands

You’ve installed linux and fired up the terminal…what to do now?

Here are some commands that will help you start this journey.

pwd

The pwd command (abreviation for print working directory) will print out the shell’s current directory.

The working directory is the default location in which file operations will take place. If you’ll create a new file, directory or any other operation related to them the shell will assume you’re making changes in the current working directory, unles you specify otherwise.

It’s important to keep track of the current working directory, in order to avoid unplesant situations.

Also keep in mind that if you type the command in caps (PWD) you will get an error.

ls

The ls command (short for list) is one of the most used Linux commands.

It will list info directories and files found in the working directory.

By itself, the ls command will list files in the current directory except for hidden files. There are many options that can be used with this command, I will cover a couple of them. You can check this link to see all of them.

ls -l

ls -l (lowercase L) command will print: the file type, file permission, number of hard links to the file, file owner and group, size, date and time and the name.

ls -a

ls -a command will print all the directories and files from the current working directory, includin the hidden files, that start with “.” (.filename).

ls -F

The -F option will add a “/” at the end of each directory

ls -R

ls -R will print a listing of directory trees.

You can also use more options when using the ls command, ls -la for example

Now let navigate through different directories. For this we will use the cd command

cd

cd stands for change directory and it’s a command used to change the current working directory.

When you open the terminal, your current working directory is set by default to your home directory (/home/username/). If you want to navigate to a folder located in your home directory you can use the relative path do so.

cd DIRNAME

But you can also use the absolute path to the directory.

cd /home/username/DIRNAME

A single dot “.” represents the current working directory, while two dots “..” represent the directory that is above the current one.

If your are in the /home/username/DIR1/DIRNAME directory and want to move to /home/username/DIR1 the command is:

cd ../ or cd ..

In order to move to /home/username type

cd ../../

At first, I used to name my directory without spaces in their name, because I could get the cd command right and I was able to navigate to them, but it’s very easy to do so:

cd 'name of the directory'

or like this

cd name\ of\ the\ dir

This is it for now. I will make other posts covering various Linux commands.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions or use google.