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To access the contents, click the chapter and section titles.
Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux
Graphic ConsolesEven if you are running a graphic terminal, the terminal is just a fancy front end to let you communicate with the shell. KDE provides an application called kvt that you can use to access a shell. You launch a terminal by clicking the kvt icon on the panel. The icon is pictured in the next figure.
If you are running X, press Ctrl+Alt+F2 now to get into a console. I want you to get the full experience of working on the command line and forego some of the niceties provided by a graphical environment. It will make your experience more pure.
Logging in Through a ConsoleLogging into a console isnt much different than logging into KDE or X Windows. The glaring difference is that instead of using a nice GUI, you get a text interface: Caldera OpenLinux(TM) Lite Version 1.2 Copyright 1996-1998 Caldera, Inc. login: username Password: mypassword As usual, your password will not be echoed to the screen to protect you and your account. If you entered your login and password correctly, you are ready to go. What Shell Are You Running?By default, unless your system was configured by someone else, you should be running bash. To check to see what shell you are running, type echo $SHELL. Words preceded by a dollar sign indicate that the word is really the name of a variable. The echo command will print the value it finds on that $SHELL environment variable. The result should be something similar to what you see here: [alberto@digital alberto]$ echo $SHELL /bin/bash If for some strange reason youre running something other than bash, type the command bash at the prompt to start using the bash shell for the remainder of the session.
Command Line Program SyntaxMost command line programs use the following syntax: commandname [flags] arg1 arg2 argn The terms are defined as follows:
Some common commands, such as ls and pwd, are also built into some of the shells to enhance performance. Well discuss these commands in the next section.
Navigating the File SystemThe first thing that you need to learn is how to navigate using a shell. You know how to use KFM to move around the file system and access files; doing the same through the shell isnt that much more difficult. However, youll need to learn a handful of commands:
Where Are You?: pwdThe first thing you might want to know is where you are in the file system. If you just logged in, you are probably in your home directory. Even though we know this, just for the learning experience, at the prompt enter pwd: [alberto@digital alberto]$ pwd /home/alberto pwd stands for print working directory. The shell will respond by listing the absolute path to your current location. An absolute path is one that is specified from the root (/) directory.
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