Linux and the Shell Command Line

               


First - get your pi running

Some Linux Shell Commands

There are a whole lot of Linux shell commands literally thousands.  And it is unlikely you will memorize them all, or even ever use them all.  And if you are used to using a point and click graphical user interface,  the terminal (shell) command line interface can be as confusing as the Word Cloud above.  But this will pass as you gain more experience.

We will cover a few (well more than a few) of the most important commands.

First some background

  1. The default shell on the Raspberry Pi is bash.  A shell is the user interface program between the user (us) and the Kernel.
  2. From man bash:   "Bash  is  an  sh-compatible  command language interpreter that executes
           commands read from the standard input or from a file.  Bash also incor‐
           porates useful features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh)."
  3. bash will look for programs to run in $PATH:

    /home/pi/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games

Second some very important pieces of information:

  1. Linux commands and names are case sensitive foo is not the same as Foo, fOO, foO etc.
  2. To run a command in your directories you need to type ./foo where foo is the command name

Information

Directories

Files

Control

Shell Special Keys

Simple Shell Scripts



A larger list of CLI commands can be found on the VicPiMakers website.



Homework