Working in a terminal

The terminal is a text window where you type commands instead of clicking.

The four commands to start with

• pwd shows where you are
• ls lists what is in the folder
• cd folder moves into a folder, cd .. moves back out
• cat file.txt prints a file on the screen

$ pwd
/home/you
$ ls
notes.txt  downloads
$ cat notes.txt

Try it

Open a terminal, go to your home folder and list its files. Then make a folder with mkdir practice, move into it and create a file with echo hello > hi.txt. Read it back with cat hi.txt.

If a command looks scary, add --help after its name. Most tools explain themselves.