Chapter 15. Basic Commands

Table of Contents

Using This Guide
Starting a Terminal
File and Directory Commands
System Information Commands
Executing Commands with Elevated Privileges
Options
"Man" and getting help
Cutting and Pasting
Other Useful Things
More Information

Using This Guide

 

"Under Linux there are GUIs (graphical user interfaces), where you can point and click and drag, and hopefully get work done without first reading lots of documentation. The traditional Unix environment is a CLI (command line interface), where you type commands to tell the computer what to do. That is faster and more powerful, but requires finding out what the commands are."

 
  --man intro(1)

This guide will make you familiar with basic GNU/Linux shell commands. It is not intended to be a complete guide to the command line, just an introduction to complement Xubuntu's graphical tools.

  • All command names, file names or paths to directories will be shown using a monospace font.

  • All the commands on this guide are to be issued from a command prompt in a Terminal and will be shown as:

    command to type

[Note]

Linux is case sensitive. User, user, and USER are all different to Linux.