reading-notes

PREP: Practice in the Terminal

The Command Line

> The Command Line is a text based interface to the system where the user enters commands using the keyboard and will get a response based on that command.All terminals have shells but the most commonly used one is bash which stands for Bourne again shell. run echo $SHELL to see what your current shell is.

Basic Navigation

Navigation is an important part of using the command line. A lot of the things we do, such as cloning GitHub Repos or creating/delete files, depend on being able to point to the correct location of a file or director. Here are a few code commands commonly used.

• pwd - Print Working Directory - Outputs your currently location in the Terminal.
• ls - List - lists out all the items in the current location. You can list out items in a different different directory without navigating to that specific directory by typing the path after ls for example ls /anotherFolder

• cd - Change Directory - Moves you from one directory to another.

  Things to note

  • ~ = shortcut to the home directory
  • ./ = refers to all things in the current directory
  • ../ referes to all things in the parent directory (Add on extra ../ to move up an additional level)

More About Files

In Linux, EVERYTHING is a file. If we want to know what type of file something is, we just need to type file [path name]. For example, if I ran the file projects on my projects folder, the terminal will output projects: directory.

### Things to note

• Linux is Case Sensitive: Projects != projects
• Spaces in names:
  • Spaces in file/directory names are fine but when using the command line to navigate to a file or directory that has a space, we must use quotes around the file name or use the backslash '\' so that the CL can interpret where we want to go for example: File Name.txt = 'File Name.txt' or File\ Name.txt
• To list out all files in a directory including those that are hidded, use -a after the list command eg ls -a.

Manual Pages

Manual pages are a set of pages that document what a command is, it’s purpose, and its use. to look up a specific command you would type out 'man [comnmand to look up]' for example 'man ls'. Manual pages can also be searched using keywords 'man -k [search term]'.

File Manipulation

File manipulation covers all the things we can do in the file explorer but from the command line. these include Creating, deleting, renaming, and moving folders and files.

- mkdir <directory name> - Creates a directory
- rmdir <directory> - removes a directory
- cp <source> <destination> - copies a file (source) and creates a new file (destination)
- cp -r <source> <file> - Recursive copy that allows us to create copies of a directory.
- mv <source> <destination> - move items or directories into another directory. the `mv` command can also be used to rename files 
- rm <file name> - deletes a file
- rm -r <directory> - removes a non-empty directory.