Command Line Basics

- What is shell?
- The program providing the traditional text interface to the Linux system (command
interpreter)
- Listens to what user types. It is intermediary between user and Linux system
- Command interpreter
- Type of Linux shells: bash (Bourne again shell), zsh, csh, tzsh
- Bash is default shell on most Liux distributions
- We need only terminal Window
- commands, options and arguments, globbing, quoting, variables (and PATH variable)
- ls - list contents of folder
- prompt: nebojsa@srv1: ~/Documents$ - nebojsa is user, srv1 is host name (name of
linux machine), Documents$ (current folder)
- ls -l - format results a little bit differently, and gives are more informations.
l is long listing
- ls -l /home/nebojsa - we can sepcify path for listing. If no path is specified,
ls lists current directory
- In GUI (desktop environment), we would use windows!
- cat file1.txt (short for concatenate). Command cat displays the contents of a
file. In this case file1
- cat file1.txt file2.txt (we can show contents of more than one file in one
command)
- echo Hello - echo is used just to put output on screen.
- echo Hello There - echo shows arguments on console. In this case, no more than
one white space will be displayed
- Here quoting comes into place echo "Hello There" (with quotes, echo sees
only one argument)
VARIABLES
- a=Hello (we assigned value Hello to variable a)
- echo $a (we display the contents of variable a)
- a=Hello There - we see error, because a can take only one value!
- a="Hello There" * now is ok
- b="Hello Buddy"
- echo $a $b
- echo "$a$b" - it works. It treats as one argument, both $a and $b
- variable as in programming stores something
GLOBBING
- ls *.txt - show me everything that ends with txt, asterix says any character (0
or more)
- ls file?.txt - question mark is any single character
- ls * - shows everything in directory
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
-special type of variables
-for example path
-echo $PATH - shows us a bunch of different directories (similar concept in
windows)
- PATH tells the shell where to look for specific commands
- which ls - search for ls command and shows where binary ls lives (where it is)
- if there are any executive files in any of the folders in $PATH variable, they
can be executed from whatever folder
- ls; ls - runs ls command twice. We can in one command line put more commands
separated with ;
- echo $a;echo $b; - we will show variable contents in two separate lines, we run
two different commands
- history - gives us all commands we typed