- Welcome to the Command Line
- Starting Up the Terminal
- Getting Started
- Building Pipelines
- Running Commands as the Superuser
- Finding Help
- Moving Around the Filesystem
- Manipulating Files and Folders
- System Information Commands
- Searching and Editing Text Files
- Dealing with Users and Groups
- Getting Help on the Command Line
- Searching for Man Files
- Using Wildcards
- Executing Multiple Commands
- Moving to More Advanced Uses of the Command Line
Starting Up the Terminal
The terminal can be found by clicking Accessories in the Launcher to find Terminal. When it first launches, you will see something similar to what Figure A-1 shows.
Figure A-1 The terminal window
You will see a blinking cursor immediately preceded by some letters, and perhaps numbers and symbols, ending with a $. The first word in that string of characters is your username, followed by the @ symbol. After the @, the hostname of your computer is listed, followed by a colon and the name of the directory you are currently in (you always start in your home directory, which is represented by a ~ symbol).
There are many dozens of commands. This appendix presents just a few useful ones in a narrative style to get you started, then lists some more with just a basic description and broken down by category.