Console Skills

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The console is a very powerful tool in any OS. This tutorial covers some of the very basic skills in using a console on Linux. A lot of people are afraid of using the console and think that it is difficult or that it will ruin their system - it really won't, it is very easy. Each aspect is accompanied with a video so that you may easily follow the steps. The two basic aspect which we are going to cover here are navigation and file editting.

Navigation

Perhaps the most essential tool with using the console is how to navigate to different folders on your computer. This provides a way for you to execute specific commands in certain areas on your computer. In the following video I type in a few basic commands, such as:

pwd shows you your current path, i.e., it tells you where you are.
ls shows you the contents of where you are. ls -l gives you a detailed list of the contents.
cd X/ changes directory to the sub-directory X.

In addition to these basic commands I also press the TAB button. This is a very handy feature as it automatically completes the file's name for you. For instance, if you want to change into the sub-directory verycomplicatedname_v1.56.24 then it is a bit of a pain to type all that into the console with out a typo. So, all you need to do is type, say, cd ve and then press TAB and the computer will fill out the rest of the name for you. Look at around 28seconds and you'll see the command suddenly fill out, this is me pressing TAB.

One final thing to note before you watch the video is that I type cd ../ at one point in the video. We have already discussed that cd changes directory; ../ just means 'up one', i.e., return to parent folder or go back up one on the folder tree.

I hope you found the video to be very simple and that the skills which were shown weren't scary at all. Just open up a console on your computer and try them for yourself!

File Editting

Now we move onto a more practical example: file editting. In this series of examples we start to move forward, I use these new commands:

touch X creates a file called X in your current directory.
vi X open the file X in a small text editor.
rm X removes (deletes) the file X.

I hope you'll recognise some of the commands which were shown in the earlier examples. Once I have navigated to the folder I check that it is empty. I then create a text file called words.txt. Then I procede to open the file. Once it is open I press INSERT. This changes the editor into 'typing-mode' so that I can type hello. I then press ESC to get out of 'typing-mode' and save the file and quit it by typing :wq. I then list the contents of the folder so that you can see the filesize change from 0 Bytes to 6 Bytes. I then open the file again to read it and close it straight away by just typing :q. I then open it for a third time and add the word world to the file and save and close the file. I then conclude by deleting the file.

This is prehaps the most useful skill as this is very important when you want to change or edit config files on your computer. It is far easier and faster to just use vi in a console than fire up a GUI like KATE to do these little jobs.

I hope this brief tutorial has been helpful for you and shown you that there is nothing to be scared about in using the console. You might want to check out some common Linux Bash Commands if you want to try out some new things or a guide on using vi.