The Linux Command Line Chapter 6
Notes:
The operating system on your Raspberry Pi is a version of Linux. In all probability, it looks a bit like Windows, or – more likely – like the Mac OS. It has a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows you to interact with your folders and files by double-clicking, right- or left-clicking, or dragging and dropping. If you want to open a program, you look for it on a menu called something like “Applications”. That’s all very well, but there is another way to interact with Linux: using the command line interface ( CLI ). With the CLI there are no images; nothing to click on. To get your computer to do something, you must type a properly constructed text command. Often, you’ll only know that your command has been successfully executed because your computer won’t respond. If it does respond, something has gone wrong and it’s giving you an error message. That sounds like hard work. Do we really want to bother with it? Yes, we do! For a start, by default, some versions of Linux boot directly into the CLI. To open the GUI, with all its lovely windows and menus, you then need to type the command “ startx ” and press Return. But that’s by no means the only reason to get to grips with the CLI. With the command line you can do things that you can’t do using the GUI and you can do things easily that are difficult in the GUI. Compared with the graphical interface, the command line hardly uses any processing or graphics power, so it’s great if you have heavy work for your computer to do. And, if you’re connecting remotely to a Raspberry Pi that doesn’t have its own monitor, then you’ll have to use the CLI. If you’re new to Linux, you may not be familiar with the command line in general and with Linux commands in particular (they’re sometimes similar to their Windows equivalents, but often they’re completely different). This chapter is a quick introduction to the magic of the command line. It contains everything you need to get started.
The Linux Command Line
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