Introduction

Here we are going to teach you how to interact with a Linux machine. There are two way that a computer can be controlled; the first is through the graphical user interface (GUI), which is most likely how you navigated to this page, and the second is via the command line. Which, instead of clicking and dragging, involves issuing written commands to an interactive terminal, that are then executed, with the output displayed to you in text.

Opening a Terminal

On macOS and Linux, open the Terminal App. On Windows, open CMD.

Opening a terminal should give you a prompt like this:

Text Only

[Bennu:~/Documents] Osiris%

Where,
- Bennu = hostname
- ~/Documents = current location
- Osiris = username

Files and Directories Structure

Everything in Linux is either a file or directory.

A file is basically a chunk of data stored on a hard drive, with a name to place it in the file system.

Directories only contain data on the files and other directories that are in them.

To give you an idea of this, a basic outline of the Linux file system is given below:

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/
├── bin
├── boot
├── dev
├── etc
├── home
    ├── Osiris
        ├── file.py
        ├── Documents
            ├── cool-stuff.py
        ├── Downloads
        ├── Music