Linux Terminal Basics

To run some of the following commands you need to have administrative access. Once Linux is installed, create a new user and log in as that, this will be the standard account. To run commands that require elevation precede the command with ‘sudo‘.

Before a standard user can do this they must first be added into the group ‘sudo‘. Once the user is created run:

dir – lists files and folders in the current directory

ls – lists files and folders in the current directory

cd    – Change Directory

example: cd Desktop/

cd .. – move up one level

mv – Move a file or it can be used to rename a file too.

Move example: mv sampletext.txt Desktop/

Rename example: mv sampletext.txt justsampletext.txt

cp – justsampletext.txt /root

rm – justsampletext.txt  – Deletes the text file.

We can get help on commands and apps. Here we get help on VIM text editor.

Or we could use a ‘Man page‘ which is a more verbose help function.

ifconfig – Interface configuration

First run an ifconfig and identify the interface you need to configure. Ethernet interfaces are named ‘eth0’ , ‘eth1’ and so on. 

Any changes wont take effect untill the machine is rebooted or the NIC is disabled and re-enabled.

All of this can also be done in the GUI.

GREP is used to get an end result. In the example below we can use grep to filter the results of the ls command to anything with ‘NTFS’ in it in the sbin folder.

The kill command can be used to terminate processes. I have started VIM and opened another Terminal.

ps -A – Shows list of all running processes. 

We could pipe this into grep to narrow down our search.

Now we have the process ID we can terminate it. The “-9” is a semi-graceful way to terminate the process.

If kill -9 does now work, -15 is the most efficient kill value.

If we know the name of an application we can simply install it from the terminal; here we install an text editor called ‘kate’.