Getting Started
Welcome to the Course
In this lesson, we are going to get set up for learning how to navigate around the Linux filesystem using a terminal emulator.
Prerequisites
- No prior experience is required, but some familiarity with what a terminal emulator is will be helpful
- You do not need to have a Linux environment set up, as we will be using an online emulator to keep things simple
- You do need a device with a web browser and Internet access, which you obviously have since you are reading this
Accessing the Linux Emulator
To keep things as simple as possible, I have decided to use a free, online Linux emulator as the environment for this course.
All you need to do is click this link to JSLinux and a terminal emulator will open in your browser.
Once you have opened the link, you should see something similar to the following:
No Login Required
For our purposes, you can ignore the message explaining how to connect an account, etc.
You will not need to do any of that.
Like I said, we are keeping things simple.
Running Your First Command
The first thing we are going to do is clear this message from the screen. We don’t need to read it anymore, so let’s get rid of it.
If we want our Linux computer to do something, all we need to do is tell it what to do. Pretty simple!
These instructions that we give the Linux computer are rightly called commands.
Let’s tell our Linux computer to clear the text that is currently written in our terminal emulator by typing out the word clear and pressing the Enter/Return key.
Before you press Enter/Return, your terminal emulator screen should look something like this (under the welcome message, of course):
| |
Taking a Look at the Result
If all went well, the text that was in the terminal emulator should be gone now. All that should be left is some text like localhost:~# and a flashing rectangle.
Prompts
You might be wondering why some text like localhost:~# was left on the screen.
This is called a prompt.
You do not need to worry about prompts in this course, as we will be focusing on simply learning commands, but just know that localhost is the name of our emulated Linux computer, the colon (:) acts like a divider, and what follows the colon is some information about where we are on the filesystem currently and what sort of things we can do (referred to as privileges, in Linux).
Cursors
The flashing rectangle is what we refer to as the cursor. If you typed text into any word processor or text editor in the past, then you probably already know what this indicates, but let’s cover our bases.
The cursor represents where our keystrokes are going to appear as we type characters on our keyboard.
Moving the Cursor
Go ahead and type anything you want to make text appear in the terminal emulator and then use the Left Arrow and Right Arrow keys to move the cursor around the letters you typed out.
As you would expect, we can use this functionality combined with the Backspace key to edit our commands before we send them to be executed.
Wrapping Up
It may not seem like it yet, but in this first lesson, we have already accomplished a lot.
We have:
- Opened an emulated Linux environment in our browser
- Read a welcome message from a terminal emulator session
- Learned our first command (
clear) and executed it to clear text from the screen - Became introduced to prompts (the weird text that was left over after we cleared the screen)
- Moved a cursor using keyboard input
In the next lesson, we will learn about the difference between a Graphical User Interface and a Command Line Interface, as well as have some fun with a new command: pwd.