Familiarizing yourself with the Linux Terminal

Now that we have our Ubuntu Desktop installed and configured in VirtualBox. I like to show you how to familiarizing yourself with the Linux Terminal.

How to Start VirtualBox Machine

To start the virtual machine just right click on that and go to start you have three options. And what you’re interested in is the normal start now.

To see the screen properly what I like to do is expand this so you can either enter full screen mode or you press Ctrl + command F on your keyboard if you’re on Mac. Or you can just click on the expand maximize button to do that.

Ubuntu Desktop Interface

You might have gotten the prompt to put in your password when you do that you will see this beautiful interface.

Basically your entire career around DevOps is basically gonna revolve around Linux operating system. But when you start working in the real world. Or if you’re currently working in the real world you probably won’t be working on a GUI(graphical user interface) based system.

Where you get to click and see Mouse moving around. You’re gonna have to deal with the terminal and I’m gonna show you how to get into the terminal

You see this icon bottom left side that says show applications click on that and that will bring up a box where you can type things. I’m going to search for terminal and click on that and basically it’s going to bring up this terminal box.

Why you need LINUX TERMINAL to work in DevOps

Let’s talk about the terminal so you might be wondering why we need the terminal to do everything we’re doing in DevOps. Well there’s quite a number of reasons why it’s quite important to know how to navigate the Linux terminal.

One of which is for connectivity reasons so if you want to connect remotely to another computer your best doing that through the terminal you can imagine as a systems administrator or a DevOps engineer.

And you have hundreds of thousands of servers to manage. It’s very unrealistic that you’ll be going into a computer using the graphical user interface to connect just like we’ve done on VirtualBox.

You can easily connect to another computer straight from the terminal so it makes administration very easy.

Home Folder on Ubuntu Desktop

Now the first thing you would notice is I’ve got my name here there’s an app symbol there is the name of the computer. I remember what we were creating the Ubuntu desktop I specify the web server there that’s basically the name of the computer.

There’s this squeeze Li icon here it’s called “tilde” character i blue and it basically represents the home folder. And this dollar sign as well basically signifies that this is a regular user not a super user in the system and we get into all of that information in upcoming articles.

Now Dare@webserver is basically saying direct connected to web server if I were to connect to another server this would change and you start seeing that happening very soon.

Home Folder on Ubuntu Desktop

What we start going into remote connectivity now let’s talk about the home folder. This home folder on picture above.

So this home folder if we go here into this icon here that is going to show us basically the graphical version of what we’re doing.

Familiarizing Linux Terminal Commands – Ls | pwd | touch | cat | clear (CTL L) | tail | head

On the Linux terminal now you can see home. So home represents where we are on graphic interface and there’s a command called “PWD” If I enter you can see “/home/dare”.

So basically “home/dare” is where we are and this is basically what’s going on in home. You may won’t be able to see “dare”. But you know this is the “home” of “dare”. And there are many folders in the home for dare.

To see all these folders what we need to do is to use a command called “LS”. You would see just about the same folders that we’re seeing in the graphical user interface on its desktop.

documents  - downloads - desktop

The order is not the same but it’s basically the same thing right so. Let’s try to create a file now.

there’s a there’s a command to do that called torch if I type “touch” and I named it just DevOps. As you can see on the graphical user interface. Now we have the file called DevOps if I open up this file graphically.

And let’s just write something in there “I am learning Linux to become a DevOps engineer”. And if I click on the Save button and to read the content of this file on the terminal.

I would use the command called “cat DevOps. Now if I hit on enter you can see what I wrote in here I can also see it straight from the terminal.

All right I want us to keep taking note of the commands we’ve been learning so far.

First we have learned “PWD”, second we have learned “LS”, third we have learned, forth we have learned “cats”. And the next one I like to show you how to use the “clear” command.

So if I type in clear it would basically clear the screen and everything will become plain again. Now another thing you can do instead of using the command Clear is. You can just use ctrl + L and that basically does the same thing. let’s save this file.

The last command I like to show you is the “tail” command. So let’s do a tail on our DevOps file.

Notice what happens here the first line of text has been removed. And all we have is LS Touch Cat and Clear. So basically what “tail” does is it just shows us the last part of the file.

And there’s the opposite to that which is the “head” if I did “head” as you can see it’s taking the data from the top. That’s the difference between the two.

So we would end this article and in the next article I’ll show you more commands and gradually taking baby steps.