'Terminal' Can Be A Good Thing
The bulk of this tutorial will focus on the command line interface with your computer known as the terminal. The power and simplicity of the terminal are well known. When on your Unix computer you will find that it sometimes easy, and much faster, to use the terminal then using a GUI.
What is the terminal?
The terminal is your communication window right to the OS, in this case Unix. You can issue commands to find out where you are in the file system, change directories forward or backwards in the file system, create/delete files, move folders, search directories, execute scripts, and endless more possibilities. By learning the fundamental commands, you will be able to do all of this in a few hours.
Why a Command Line Interface?
The commands themselves are very simple programs. They are effective, fast, and very flexible. By chaining commands or even inventing your own you can perform very complex operations with a single command. Why take seconds to load a large graphical program just to move a file, when typing one command can do the same without the wait.
I can tell you're excited so lets move quickly. You can read more about all of these concepts later in the tutorial. Before touching the terminal though you should know what you are dealing with first.
the file system »