THE TERMINAL

While Ubuntu’s Unity desktop provides a familiar point-and-click environment for day-to-day tasks, it’s no match for the power and versatility of the Linux shell, the underlying command-line environment. And thanks to the Terminal, you can interact with the shell without leaving the desktop.

The shell utilizes a language called BASH to run specific commands using a series of tools. Each command follows the same basic structure:

$ utility command -option

The “utility” bit is the tool you wish to run—for example, “cd” to change directory, or “apt-get” to run the package management tool. Some utilities can be run on their own—type “ls” to get a basic list of all files and folders in a directory, for example.

If you add a “command” to the utility, you can specify what you want that utility to do:

$ apt-get install program

This instructs the package management tool to install the named program. The “-option” section is where you specify preferences using “flags.” Each flag is preceded by one (-) or two (--) dashes. For example, to get more detailed information about the contents of the current folder, type:

$ ls -l

The “-l” flag ensures you get extra snippets, such as file permissions and owner, plus the date it was last modified, and its size in bytes.