“So, you’ve got Linux installed and running, and now you’re
staring at a blank shell prompt. You’re thinking to yourself,
“OK…now what?” In this article, we’ll give you the
background you need to start using the command line
effectively.”
“First, let’s talk about the shell. The shell is a program that
takes your typed commands, and passes them to the operating system
so that it can perform some sort of action. There are different
shells available to you, and each one behaves differently. By
default, most Linux distributions use the Bash shell, so that’s the
one we’ll use for our examples. If you want to find out which shell
you are using, type the following at a command line:”
echo $SHELL
“If you see something like “/bin/bash”, you’ll know that you are
using the bash shell. Other shells include pdksh (the Public Domain
Korn Shell), tcsh (the TC Shell), and zsh (the Z Shell). For most
users, bash is an excellent choice. Bash has some very nice
features such as a command history. Pressing the up arrow will go
through your most recent commands, so that you don’t have to retype
them. Bash also supports tab completion, meaning that if you type
part of a path or filename, bash will attempt to complete it for
you when you press the TAB key. If there are multiple
possibilities, pressing “tab” twice will display them all.”