Command line basics

The command prompt

If you've reached here, you should have a terminal window open, and it will be showing you a prompt:

<prompt> %

This is what the command line shows when it is ready to receive input.

Running some simple commands

The basic idea is that once you type a command and press Enter, the command line will execute it, display any output, and when it is finished it will show you the prompt again.

When you first open a terminal, you might want to find out a bit about where you are.

You can find out what your username is with whoami:

% whoami

Type this and press enter - it should print your username, something like:

duncan

Note

Remember that we are using % to denote the command prompt - you don't tyope that bit, just the command and press enter.

Find the hostname of the computer you're using with hostname

% hostname

duncans-laptop

the directory you're currently in with pwd (print working directory)

% pwd

/home/duncan

what files are there in the directory you're in

% ls

You should see a list of files. (We'll come back to directories and files later on.)

There's probably nothing much there at the moment! Let's make a few files so we have a more realistic home directory:

% touch bash_intro1.md  bash_intro_2012.md  bash_intro2.md  bash_introduction.doc  bash_intro.md  bash_intro.md.old .very_secret

The touch command should have created empty files for any which did not previously exist for us - use ls to check this:

% ls

which will look something like:

bash_intro1.md      bash_intro2.md         bash_intro.md
bash_intro_2012.md  bash_introduction.doc  bash_intro.md.old

plus the other stuff that was there before.

Or, to try something different, what about getting the shell to print a message? For example, try the command:

% echo "Look at me"

The echo command simply echoes input text back as output, so this should just print "Look at me".

Finally, you can find out you've been up to recently with history:

% history

 1 whoami
 2 hostname
 3 pwd
 4 ls
 5 touch bash_intro1.md  bash_intro_2012.md  bash_intro2.md  bash_introduction.doc  bash_intro.md  bash_intro.md.old .very_secret
 6 ls
 7 echo
 8 history

Note

This is a good time to point out that the command line is case sensitive - that is, capitalisation matters. For example if you accidentally type:

% History

... it won't work and you will see an error message, something like:

Command 'History' not found.

The terminal couldn't find any command called 'History' (even though one called 'history', in lower-case, exists.)

BASH has hundreds of commands, but don’t panic! In most cases, you’ll only use a handful of them in your day-to-day work.

What is a command anyway?

What's actually happening when you run a command? Well, most 'commands' are really just programs - they are files which live on the filesystem somewhere. A few are instead built-in to the terminal shell itself. To find out, you can try using the which command:

% which ls

You should see that ls lives in the /bin folder. (We'll return to the question of how the terminal knows to look in that folder later on in the tutorial.)

Question

Where does whoami live? What about echo?

If you want to see what other programs exist - you could trying using ls to see the contents of those folders:

% ls /bin     
                csh             echo            ksh             mkdir           rm              sync            zsh
bash            dash            ed              launchctl       mv              rmdir           tcsh
cat             date            expr            link            pax             sh              test
chmod           dd              hostname        ln              ps              sleep           unlink
cp              df              kill            ls              pwd             stty            wait4path

There are lots of other commands available in that one folder alone!

However before you go off to experiment with these commands - take care! Some of these commands, like rm and rmdir can delete files, while others like kill can stop essential processes that are running on your system. These commands can mess up your system. Even worse, once a file is deleted, there's no getting it back - there's no 'bin' or 'trashcan' to recover it from.

Note

This illustrates a feature of the command line - it does what you tell it, and assumes you know what you are doing.

Other commands, like hostname and pwd (which tells you the current directory) are perfectly safe.

A table of useful commands

For this tutorial we will instead focus on a few common and useful commands. We've put a table of these in in an appendix but here are a few to get you started. (If you want to try these, create a new file first by running this command:

% echo 'This is my file` > my_file.txt

We'll come back later to how this works.)

Command	What it does	Examples
hostname	What computer am I on?	hostname
pwd	What directory am I in?	pwd
ls	List files in a directory, or a file or files you specify.	ls (current directory) or ls /bin
cp	Copy a file to a new name or folder.	cp my_file.txt my_file2.txt
mv	Move a file to a new name or folder (removing the original).	mv my_file2.txt my_file3.txt
mkdir	Create a new directory.	mkdir new_directory
rmdir	Removes an entire directory. (Fails if the directory is not empty.)	rmdir new_directory
rm	Removes a file without asking for confirmation.	rm my_file3.txt
cat	Print out the contents of a text file or files.	cat my_file.txt
less	Iteractively show the contents of a text file.	less my_file.txt
head	Show the first few lines of a file.	head my_file.txt
tail	Show the last few lines of a file.	tail my_file.txt
wc	Counts the lines, words and letters in a file.	wc my_file.txt
grep	Searches for a snippet of text in a file, showing matching lines.	grep 'second' my_file.txt

Question

Where do all these commands live on the filesystem? Use which to find out.

In the next few pages we will walk you through the use of many of these commands. First, let's learn how to get help on these commands.