Linux Command Line Tutorial for Beginners

Typographical Conventions

Introduction to The Linux Operating System

Tutorial One

• Listing files and directories
• Making Directories
• Changing to a different Directory
• The directories . and ..
• Pathnames
• More about home directories and pathnames

Tutorial Two

• Copying Files
• Moving Files
• Removing Files and directories
• Displaying the contents of a file on the screen
• Searching the contents of a file

Tutorial Three

• Redirection
• Redirecting the Output
• Redirecting the Input
• Pipes

Tutorial Four

• Wildcards
• Filename Conventions
• Getting Help

Tutorial Five

• File system security (access rights)
• Changing access rights
• Processes and Jobs
• Listing suspended and background processes
• Killing a process

Tutorial Six

• Other Useful Linux commands

Tutorial Seven

• Compiling Linux software packages
• Download source code
• Extracting source code
• Configuring and creating the Makefile
• Building the package
• Running the software
• Stripping unnecessary code

Tutorial Eight

• Linux variables
• Environment variables
• Shell variables
• Using and setting variables

By M.Stonebank@surrey.ac.uk, © 19 October 2001
Minor modifications by David B. Dahl, Fall 2005

This tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons License.