Linux Tutorial - Basic Command Line

Hey, what's going on guys? I wanted to

make a video for people that are new to

Linux and new to the command line to

maybe help you out a little bit and show

you how to navigate the terminal and do

some very basic tasks. So a lot of people

ask me why I work on Windows in most of

my videos, and let me just clarify by

saying that I'm in no way of shape or

form a Windows Fanboy. I actually like

working on Linux better for web

development programming. There is a

few reasons why I have Windows installed

on my main machine. One is for the

recording software. I use Camtasia

which works flawlessly for what I need it

to do. And I haven't found a Linux-based

solution that works how I need it

to and processes the videos as fast

as I need them to. I also use Adobe

Photoshop and then a lot of other

Windows-based tools. I also have six

monitors, and it's a pain in the ass to

try and get them working with the Ubuntu

and working with the drivers.

I know I could do it if I really

tried, but it's just something that

hinders me. Another reason is gaming. I

have a pretty beefy system with SLI

graphics cards. And, obviously, if you

play games, you want to run Windows. Now,

that's not a huge deal because I very

rarely play games anymore because I'm so

busy. But that is one of the issues.

And then the main reason I use Windows

in a lot of my videos is because I'm

trying to reach everybody of all skill

sets. And chances are, a person that is

just learning HTML and front-end

development is running Windows. And they

may get lost if I'm using Linux or Mac.

Now, I know many of you do use Linux

or Mac, but I think that there's more of

a chance of a Linux or Mac user knowing

and understanding what I'm doing in

Windows than the other way around. So

that's probably the biggest reason. For

my own personal development, I do work on

Linux in a virtual machine. And

I'm going to start using Linux more in

my videos. So anyway, let's jump in and

learn some basic commands. Now, if you're

a Windows user I would suggest getting

something like VMware or VirtualBox and

installing a Linux distribution. You may

not want to go as far as to install it

on your main machine for your everyday

use, but you should get into it and start

to experiment with it. As far as distros, I

prefer Ubuntu or Debian, and there's

also- there's a lot to choose from, okay?

For beginners, I would recommend Debian,

Ubuntu, or even Linux Mint, openSUSE- sorry,

openSUSE, however you say it, is a little

more complicated, but I do like that as

well. So let's get into it.

Currently Ubuntu is using the Unity

desktop interface, but you can use a

different environment if you want. And

we're going to go and open the terminal.

Now, I use a program called Terminator. So

that's what I'm going to be using. If you

install Ubuntu fresh, you're going to

just have the regular terminal which

is this right here, but it doesn't really

matter. You use the same commands. All

right, so let's go ahead and just make

that a little bigger. Now, when you first

open your terminal, you're going to

be in your home directory, okay? Every

user on a Linux system has a home

directory, much like on Windows, if you go

to users, you have your usernames

for each account. So Linux does the same

thing. In fact, if we look at the file

manager, and you can see that actually

opens in the home directory as well.

If we go to the actual root directory,

it's going to be in home. And you'll see

I have a folder called 'brad', okay? I

only have one user on this system. So

over here, you can actually check your-

what path you're in with the command PWD,

okay? You can see I'm in home brad. So

that's the First Command. Now if you

want to show the listings like you do in

file manager in your command line, you

can use the ls, okay, the listing command.

And you can see that these are the same

folders that we're seeing here, all right?

Now, with commands, you also have options,

okay? Most commands have some options you

can use. Now with ls, we have an option

of -a. And what that does is it'll show

everything, even the hidden files, the

system files that begin with the dot,

it'll show those as well. By

default, those are hidden, okay? Much like

hidden files in Windows. Now we can

also use the -l. So if we say ls -l, and

that just shows us some extra

information. The time it was created, the

date, the size. Now, this here at the

beginning, this looks kind of weird.

What this is is the permissions of the

folder or file. Basically it's broken up

into three parts. The first is for the

owner, the permissions of the owner of

the folder or file. Then the permissions

for the group, okay, because you can also

have user groups and then the permission

for everyone else, for the rest of the

world, or the public. Now, these basically

stand for delete. The D is delete. Read,

write, and execute, okay? So basically the

owner of the folder or file has all these

permissions. They can do whatever they

want. The group can only execute and read,

and then the rest of the world can only

execute, okay? So they can't change

anything at all. That's what that is.

And then here you'll see brad brad.

The reason it says it twice is because

one is the user and then one is the

group, okay? So there's actually a group

called 'brad'.

And you can change these with

certain commands, but I'm not really

going to get into that today. I just want

to be- I want to keep things very basic.

So that's the ls command.

Now, the next command I want to

look at is mkdir, okay? And that is make

directory and it does just that. It

will create a directory, so let's create

a folder or a directory inside of our

home and let's call this- we'll call it

dir1, all right? And over here you can

see that now we have dir1. If we do ls,

you see dir1, all right? Let's create

another one called dir2.

Okay so now we have these two

directories. And the next command we're

going to look at is cd and that's change

directory. So if we want to go into

dir1, we can say CD dir1.

And you'll see that the prompt here

has now changed. It shows us where we are.

If we do pwd, it'll show us we're in

directory one, okay?

Now, if we want to go back one level,

back into the home, we can do CD space

dot dot. And so you can see now we're

back in the home, okay? If you want to

navigate to the absolute root of your

system, you could do cd and then slash.

And now if we do ls, you'll see we're in

the actual root of the entire system,

all right? If you want to go back home,

you could just do cd, and that'll bring

you back home. You can also do cd and

then this tilde, which is the key

that's to the left of the number one

key. And that basically represents

home. So we can do that. If we want to go

into dir2, let's say in the home, we

could do- from anywhere we could do the

tilde slash dir2, okay? And if we want to

go back out, go cd dot dot. And then let's

go back into dir1,

okay? Another helpful command is

clear. If we do clear, it'll just do just

that. It'll clear out the terminal,

all right? So you know how to

find your path. You know how to create

directories, how to list the contents, how

to change directories. That's very

basic. Now what we're going to do is

I'm going to show you how to create a

file. So let's say we want to create a

text file.

We could use the touch command. So we say

touch, we'll say file one dot text. And now

if we do an ls, you can see we have that

file one. Now, if we want to edit that

file, of course, you could do that from

within your file manager. So you could

just go to file one dot text, and I think,

yeah, it'll open with gedit if you open

it here. But you can also use command

based- command line-based text editors. So

the one that I would recommend for

for beginners is Nano, okay? It's very

easy to use. Now if we say Nano

file one dot text, it's going to bring

us into a screen like this. So this is

the Nano editor. And like I said, it's

pretty easy to use. Basically we could

just- let's just say hello world,

okay? Now, if we wanted to exit out, we

want to do a control 'x', and then it's going

to ask if we want to to save or not, okay?

So we're going to say y for yes and then

enter, and then that will edit the file

and save it, okay? So control 'x' to escape,

yes or no to save,

okay? And you won't get prompted if

you don't edit it at all, you won't get

prompted to save or not. Now, you can also

use the cat command to see what's in a

file. So we'll say cat file1.txt, and

it'll show us what's in it.

It basically takes the input and puts

it to standard output, which is what's

shown here. Now, if this is a really,

really long file and you have to page

down, you can use less instead of cat. So

file one

dot text, and you could- you'd be able to

page down, okay, and see the whole file.

And then to get out of it, you just want

to hit 'q' and that'll quit, okay? So that's

cat and less.

Now, let's say we want to rename

this file, okay? So there's a command to

move files and rename, and that's mv. So

if we say mv file1.txt

and space file2.txt,

okay? And then we do an ls. You can see

that file1 has now been renamed to

file2. And if we say cat

file2.txt, you can see it's the hello

world.

Now, we can also copy files. So let's say

we want to take file2 and create file1,

but also keep file2, then we could

do cp, okay? That's the copy command.

File2.txt and we want to copy it to file1.txt.

And now if we look at the

contents, we have both files. And if we

say cat file1,

hello world, okay? So let's clear this

out.

Now, we can move and copy to other

locations as well. So if we want to, let's

say, copy file1.txt, we want to copy it

to, let's say, tilde for the home

and then slash

dir2 slash

file1.txt,

Okay, and then we'll switch directories.

Let's say

cd dot dot and then cd dir2.

Whoop, cd dir2 and ls. And there's the file

one, okay? So we can do that as

well. Now, if you want to delete a file or

remove a file, you can use the rm command.

Okay, so let's say we want to delete

file one. We can say rm file1.txt.

And now if we look, now it's gone, all

right? Now, if you want to remove a

directory, let's go out to our home, and

let's say we want to remove directory 2,

we can do rmdir

dir2, okay? So now if we do

ls. Directory 2 is now gone. Now I'm going

to put it back. We're going to make

directory dir2, and then I'm going to go

into it,

and I'm going to create a file.

So touch file1.txt, and I'm going to

go back out to my route, and I'm going to

try to delete dir2.

And now you see it says failed to

remove dir2. Directory is not empty. So

this command isn't going to work if the

directory is empty. If it has

files in it and you want to delete it,

you want to use rm, but if you just do rm

dir2, it'll say can't remove it. So you

need to add the dash capital r option

which is for recursive. So you want to do

rm -R and then dir2. And now if we do

an ls, dir2 is gone as well as all the

files that are in it.

So let's clear that out. And then the

next command I want to look at is which.

So what which does is it'll search for

a file or a folder's location and

give you that location. So let's

say we want to look for the mongoD

application, which is the mongodDB

server. We could say which mongod, and

that'll show you exactly where it's in.

It's in the usr, bin, mongod. Okay, so

that can come in pretty handy.

So what else? Let's say let's

use the history command. And history will

basically show you your last, what is

it? 500 or so, 400? Well, I think it's your

last 500 commands.

Okay, so that can be handy to see

what you've been doing or to see what

someone else has been doing.

Let's see, what else? So we've

went over pretty much all the basics of,

you know, moving files and folders around

and deleting them and renaming them. So

those are the most important. Those

are the things that you absolutely need

to know. Now, some things you can't run

as your user- you have to run it as the

root user. And you never want to be

really, you know, messing around with stuff

logged in as the root user. So

for that, you could use sudo. So let's

try to run, for instance, apt get update,

which I'll go over in a minute. It's

not going to let us. Basically it says

that we don't have the permission to. So

if we do

sudo apt get update, it's going to ask

for our password,

and then it'll run it, okay?

And that's just updating our packages,

and I'll get to that in a second. So

you want to use sudo to run as

root. Let's clear this out.

Now, let's look at some system

commands. So these are- you don't need

these to be able to navigate or

anything, but they're good to know. So

first one is ifconfig,

and this is just like ipconfig

on Windows. It basically it's going to

give you all your network information,

your ethernet cards, your IP address,

your local IP address, your loop back,

things like that. Pretty much

identical to ipconfig in Windows if

you've ever used that. For wireless, you

can do iwconfig.

And that's going to show you- I

don't have any wireless on this machine,

but if you did, it would show you that

stuff, okay? Now, if you want

to ping another machine or over the

either over the Internet or on your

local network, you could say ping, for

instance, let's say

google.com to see if that's online. You

can see we're getting a

response back from our request, okay? And

it's just going to keep going like this,

but if you want to stop it, you can do a

control 'c', okay? So if we try to ping

something that's most likely not a

domain, you'll see we get unknown host,

okay? So that's how you can tell if

you can actually reach a certain machine

or not, okay? So let's look at some other

system commands. Let's see, we have

uname. Let's do uname -a. That's going

to just basically give us a summary of

our system, the operating system, the

version, things like that, okay? We also

have- let's do

bld. I'm sorry,

blkid, and what that does is it basically

shows us our hard drive. So I have a

my regular hard drive and then

what's called a swap, okay? So when Linux

partitions your drive, it puts a

little bit aside for a swap file here.

Let's see, what else? If we do top,

that's another command. That's basically

going to show us our processes and

how much memory and CPU they're taking up,

things like that. Kind of like the

the Task Manager in Windows, even though

there is a System Monitor

right here that you can use in

Linux as well, and that'll show you

resources, stuff like that, the running

processes, okay? And to get out of this,

you just want to hit 'q'.

Let's see, what else? What else did I

want to do? Df is another command.

That'll show us our available and

unavailable disk space. We have lsusb

which will show devices like USB hubs,

things like that. For PCI stuff, you

can use ls pci, and that'll show you

all that crap, a lot of which I don't

even understand, but it's available to you.

Let's see, I think that's

pretty much it.

Oh, package managers. Package managers

are a big part of most Linux

distributions. Different distributions

use different managers. Debian and Ubuntu uses

apt get. So we can say

sudo apt get and then install, and then

we can install any package that's

available. So let's say we want to

install filezilla, which is an FTP client,

okay? So as long as it's available, it'll

go ahead and install that for us on our

system, all right? And now if we go to up

here and we search for filezilla, there

it is, okay? And we can move it over here if

we want, and it's as easy as that,

which is much easier than in, you know,

in Windows having to go to the site,

download it, go through the installer.

This is one of the the best reasons to

use Linux. Now, if we want to get rid

of it, we could simply do

sudo apt get

remove

filezilla. And that will- we'll say yes.

And that will remove it. You can see

it just disappeared, okay? Now, if you

want to update or see if there's

available updates for packages on

your system, you can do

sudo apt get update. And it'll run

through and check everything,

and if it finds something, it'll let

you know.

So I think that's pretty much it

guys. I don't want to get too deep

into anything here. This is meant to be

just for, you know, a beginner guide. Oh,

we also have the shutdown command. We

could say sudo

shutdown. And if you wanted to restart,

you could do a -r, but I'm going to

halt, shut the whole thing down. So I'm going to

do -h, and then you could also set a

time if you wanted to do like 10 minutes,

you could do that. But I'm just going to

do now,

okay? And it's going to go ahead and

shut down. So hopefully you guys enjoyed

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And that's it! Thanks for watching.