Terminal and Why It Is Important

Why Should I Use It?

In my opinion, the Terminal is the single most useful application in the entire operating system. You can administer the entire system from one place. In this post I will give a very basic overview of the Terminal, this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what you can do with it and I believe that EVERY Ubuntu user should know his/her way around the command line.

What Do I Do?

The Terminal is basically a text box that does things. You type something and an action is preformed. When you first open the Terminal you have the permission level of your user. In Linux you require root permissions to edit the system, root is the equivalent of a Windows Administrator account. In order to access root while in the Terminal you must type sudo before a command. This lets Ubuntu know you want to run this command with root permissions.

For Example,

sudo apt-get install gimp

This command will install the application GIMP, which is a photo editor similar to photoshop. To use this command simply type it and press Enter. Ubuntu will prompt you for your password, type it in and press Enter. Your password won't show up for security reasons, but it will work after you press Enter.

What Does What?

File Management

cd - Changes directory

cd /home/liam/Downloads

cd .. - Returns to previous directory

cd ..

ls - Lists files in directory

ls

mkdir - Creates folder

mkdir Example

rm - Removes file or folder

rm Example.txt

cp - Copies file or folder

cp Example.txt /home/liam/Documents

chmod +x - Makes file executable

chmod +x App.sh

Application Management

Apt-get is the Ubuntu package manager. This is how you install and remove applications. To use apt-get simply type,

sudo apt-get x y

Where X is what you want to do and Y is what application you want to do it to. For example,

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Which would install Flash Player, or,

sudo apt-get remove firefox

Which would remove Firefox. If you want to know any extra commands you can type,

sudo apt-get -h

To bring up the help commands, -h is a flag that brings up the help text for most applications.

Generic Application Use

To use an application from the terminal, type the application name and file to open in it. For example,

gedit readme.txt

To open a text document, or,

gimp picture.png

To open a picture. 

You can apply these commands to most anything. I will discuss the many more commands in later posts.