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What Is "The Shell"?

Simply put, the shell is a program that takes commands from the keyboard and
gives them to the operating system to perform. In the old days, it was the only
user interface available on a Unix-like system such as Linux. Nowadays, we
havegraphical user interfaces (GUIs) in addition to command line interfaces
(CLIs) such as the shell.

On most Linux systems a program called bash (which stands for Bourne Again
SHell, an enhanced version of the original Unix shell program, sh, written by Steve
Bourne) acts as the shell program. Besides bash, there are other shell programs
that can be installed in a Linux system. These include: ksh, tcsh and zsh.

What's A "Terminal?"
It's a program called a terminal emulator. This is a program that opens a window
and lets you interact with the shell. There are a bunch of different terminal
emulators you can use. Most Linux distributions supply several, such as: gnome-
terminal,konsole, xterm, rxvt, kvt, nxterm, and eterm.

Testing The Keyboard

OK, let's try some typing. Bring up a terminal window. You should see a shell
prompt that contains your user name and the name of the machine followed by a
dollar sign. Something like this:

[me@linuxbox me]$

Excellent! Now type some nonsense characters and press the enter key.

[me@linuxbox me]$ kdkjflajfks

If all went well, you should have gotten an error message complaining that it
cannot understand you:

[me@linuxbox me]$ kdkjflajfks

bash: kdkjflajfks: command not found

Wonderful! Now press the up-arrow key. Watch how our previous command
"kdkjflajfks" returns. Yes, we have command history. Press the down-arrow and we
get the blank line again.

Recall the "kdkjflajfks" command using the up-arrow key if needed. Now, try the
left and right-arrow keys. You can position the text cursor anywhere in the
command line. This allows you to easily correct mistakes.

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You're not logged in as root, are you?

If the last character of your shell prompt is # rather than $, you are operating as
the superuser. This means that you have administrative privileges. This can be
potentially dangerous, since you are able to delete or overwrite any file on the
system. Unless you absolutely need administrative privileges, do not operate as the
superuser.

Navigation
In this lesson, I will introduce your first three commands: pwd (print working
directory), cd (change directory), and ls (list files and directories).

If you have not worked with a command line interface before, you will need to pay
close attention to this lesson, since the concepts will take some getting used to.

File System Organization

Like that legacy operating system, the files on a Linux system are arranged in what
is called a hierarchical directory structure. This means that they are organized in a
tree-like pattern of directories (called folders in other systems), which may contain
files and other directories. The first directory in the file system is called the root
directory. The root directory contains files and subdirectories, which contain more
files and subdirectories and so on and so on.

Most graphical environments today include a file manager program to view and
manipulate the contents of the file system. Often you will see the file system
represented like this:

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One important difference between the legacy operating system and Unix-like
operating systems such as Linux is that Linux does not employ the concept of drive
letters. While drive letters split the file system into a series of different trees (one
for each drive), Linux always has a single tree. Different storage devices may
contain different branches of the tree, but there is always a single tree.

pwd
Since a command line interface cannot provide graphic pictures of the file system
structure, it must have a different way of representing it. Think of the file system
tree as a maze, and you are standing in it. At any given moment, you are located in
a single directory. Inside that directory, you can see its files and the pathway to
its parent directory and the pathways to the subdirectories of the directory in which
you are standing.

The directory you are standing in is called the working directory. To find the name
of the working directory, use the pwd command.

[me@linuxbox me]$ pwd

/home/me

When you first log on to a Linux system, the working directory is set to your home
directory. This is where you put your files. On most systems, your home directory
will be called /home/your_user_name, but it can be anything according to the
whims of the system administrator.

To list the files in the working directory, use the ls command.

[me@linuxbox me]$ ls
Desktop Xrootenv.0 linuxcmd
GNUstep bin nedit.rpm
GUILG00.GZ hitni123.jpg nsmail

I will come back to ls in the next lesson. There are a lot of fun things you can do
with it, but I have to talk about pathnames and directories a bit first.

cd
To change your working directory (where you are standing in the maze) you use
the cd command. To do this, type cd followed by the pathname of the desired
working directory. A pathname is the route you take along the branches of the tree
to get to the directory you want. Pathnames can be specified in one of two different
ways; absolute pathnames or relative pathnames. Let's look with absolute
pathnames first.

An absolute pathname begins with the root directory and follows the tree branch by
branch until the path to the desired directory or file is completed. For example,
there is a directory on your system in which most programs are installed. The

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pathname of the directory is /usr/bin. This means from the root directory
(represented by the leading slash in the pathname) there is a directory called "usr"
which contains a directory called "bin".

Let's try this out:

[me@linuxbox me]$ cd /usr/bin

[me@linuxbox bin]$ pwd
/usr/bin
[me@linuxbox bin]$ ls
[ lwp-request
2to3 lwp-rget
2to3-2.6 lxterm
a2p lz
aalib-config lzcat
aconnect lzma
acpi_fakekey lzmadec
acpi_listen lzmainfo
add-apt-repository m17n-db
addpart magnifier

and many more...

Now we can see that we have changed the current working directory to /usr/bin
and that it is full of files. Notice how your prompt has changed? As a convenience, it
is usually set up to display the name of the working directory.

Where an absolute pathname starts from the root directory and leads to its
destination, a relative pathname starts from the working directory. To do this, it
uses a couple of special notations to represent relative positions in the file system
tree. These special notations are "." (dot) and ".." (dot dot).

The "." notation refers to the working directory itself and the ".." notation refers to
the working directory's parent directory. Here is how it works. Let's change the
working directory to /usr/bin again:

[me@linuxbox me]$ cd /usr/bin

[me@linuxbox bin]$ pwd
/usr/bin

O.K., now let's say that we wanted to change the working directory to the parent of
/usr/bin which is /usr. We could do that two different ways. First, with an absolute
pathname:

[me@linuxbox bin]$ cd /usr

[me@linuxbox usr]$ pwd
/usr

Or, with a relative pathname:

Resource Person : Muhammad Rizwan (Lecturer, KFUEIT)

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[me@linuxbox bin]$ cd ..
[me@linuxbox usr]$ pwd
/usr

Two different methods with identical results. Which one should you use? The one
that requires the least typing!

Likewise, we can change the working directory from /usr to /usr/bin in two different
ways. First using an absolute pathname:

[me@linuxbox usr]$ cd /usr/bin

[me@linuxbox bin]$ pwd
/usr/bin

Or, with a relative pathname:

[me@linuxbox usr]$ cd ./bin

[me@linuxbox bin]$ pwd
/usr/bin

Now, there is something important that I must point out here. In almost all cases,
you can omit the "./". It is implied. Typing:

[me@linuxbox usr]$ cd bin

would do the same thing. In general, if you do not specify a pathname to

something, the working directory will be assumed. There is one important exception
to this, but we won't get to that for a while.

A Few Shortcuts
If you type cd followed by nothing, cd will change the working directory to your
home directory.

A related shortcut is to type cd ~user_name. In this case, cd will change the

working directory to the home directory of the specified user.

Typing cd - changes the working directory to the previous one.

Important facts about file names

1. File names that begin with a period character are hidden. This only means
that ls will not list them unless you say ls -a. When your account was
created, several hidden files were placed in your home directory to configure
things for your account. Later on we will take a closer look at some of these
files to see how you can customize yourenvironment. In addition, some

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applications will place their configuration and settings files in your home
directory as hidden files.

2. File names in Linux, like Unix, are case sensitive. The file names "File1" and
"file1" refer to different files.

3. Linux has no concept of a "file extension" like legacy operating systems. You
may name files any way you like. However, while Linux itself does not care
about file extensions, many application programs do.

4. Though Linux supports long file names which may contain embedded spaces
and punctuation characters, limit the punctuation characters to period, dash,
and underscore.Most importantly, do not embed spaces in file
names. If you want to represent spaces between words in a file name, use
underscore characters. You will thank yourself later.

Looking Around
Now that you know how to move from working directory to working directory, we're
going to take a tour of your Linux system and, along the way, learn some things
about what makes it tick. But before we begin, I have to teach you some tools that
will come in handy during our adventure. These are:

 ls (list files and directories)

 less (view text files)
 file (classify a file's contents)

ls
The ls command is used to list the contents of a directory. It is probably the most
commonly used Linux command. It can be used in a number of different ways. Here
are some examples:

Examples of the ls command

Command Result

ls List the files in the working directory

ls /bin List the files in the /bin directory (or any other directory you care to
specify)
ls -l List the files in the working directory in long format

ls -l /etc List the files in the /bin directory and the /etc directory in long
/bin format

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ls -la .. List all files (even ones with names beginning with a period
character, which are normally hidden) in the parent of the working
directory in long format

These examples also point out an important concept about commands. Most
commands operate like this:

command -options arguments

where command is the name of the command, -options is one or more adjustments
to the command's behavior, and arguments is one or more "things" upon which the
command operates.

In the case of ls, we see that ls is the name of the command, and that it can have
one or more options, such as -a and -l, and it can operate on one or more files or
directories.

A Closer Look At Long Format

If you use the -l option with ls, you will get a file listing that contains a wealth of
information about the files being listed. Here's an example:

-rw------- 1 bshotts bshotts 576 Apr 17 1998 weather.txt

drwxr-xr-x 6 bshotts bshotts 1024 Oct 9 1999 web_page
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bshotts bshotts 276480 Feb 11 20:41 web_site.tar
-rw------- 1 bshotts bshotts 5743 Dec 16 1998 xmas_file.txt

---------- ------- ------- -------- ------------ -------------

| | | | | |
| | | | | File Name
| | | | |
| | | | +--- Modification Time
| | | |
| | | +------------- Size (in bytes)
| | |
| | +----------------------- Group
| |
| +-------------------------------- Owner
|
+---------------------------------------------- File Permissions

File Name

The name of the file or directory.

Modification Time

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The last time the file was modified. If the last modification occurred more
than six months in the past, the date and year are displayed. Otherwise, the
time of day is shown.

Size

The size of the file in bytes.

Group

The name of the group that has file permissions in addition to the file's
owner.

Owner

The name of the user who owns the file.

File Permissions

A representation of the file's access permissions. The first character is the

type of file. A "-" indicates a regular (ordinary) file. A "d" indicates a
directory. The second set of three characters represent the read, write, and
execution rights of the file's owner. The next three represent the rights of the
file's group, and the final three represent the rights granted to everybody
else. I'll discuss this in more detail in a later lesson.

Resource Person : Muhammad Rizwan (Lecturer, KFUEIT)