Comfort On The Command Line

UNIX systems have documentation built into them in the form of man pages. You read these man pages with the man command. Type man followed by the manual you would like to read. To bring up the manual page for the ls command you would type: $> man ls You should then see a nicely formatted manual that will tell you everything you need to know about the ls command. If for some reason, you don’t get that, here is a link to what I see: [Read More]

Hello again, Today we’ll continue with another command that you can type into your terminal. We’ve already seen that pwd (print working directory) can tell us where we are, but what about if we want to see our files? The ls (list) command does just that: $> ls dead.letter mbox rtsignal.c src This lists the files and folders that are in the directory that I’m currently in: /home/gabe. I can confirm I’m in the folder I think I’m in by re-issuing the pwd command: [Read More]

Hello fellow command line interface (cli) adepts! Last time we found our terminal programs, and today we’re not afraid to use them. We probably should be, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day. As mentioned in my last post once we open our terminal program we’re presented with $> or #> or maybe gabe@desktop:~$ or who knows what. Technically, since the prompt is configurable it could say anything. When I was just a wee lad, I had mine set to say: [Read More]

Welcome to Comfort on the Command Line. I’ll be writing a series of posts to help you gain comfort with the UNIX command line interface (cli). If you’re already a cli wizard, then this may not be the guide for you. What is the command line interface (cli)? There are different ways to interact with a computer. The most common is the graphical user interface (gui) which you probably use every time you use a computer. [Read More]