Learning Essential Linux Commands for Navigating the Shell Effectively 

In this article, we cover many of the foundational commands that are, for the most part, essential for navigating the Shell Effectively.
By Expert Network - August 16, 2021 - 3:45 am

8 min read

Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how to manage software packages, we
should take a moment to learn some important concepts and commands that will allow us to build more of the
foundational knowledge that will serve us well while understanding the advanced concepts and treading the path
of expertise. These foundational concepts include core Linux commands for navigating the shell.

This article is an excerpt from the book, Mastering Ubuntu Server, Third Edition by Jeremy “Jay” La Croix – A
hands-on book that will teach you how to deploy, maintain and troubleshoot Ubuntu Server.  

Learning essential Linux commands

Building a solid competency on the command line is essential and effectively gives any system administrator or
engineer superpowers. Our new abilities won’t allow us to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but will definitely
enable us to execute terminal commands as if we’re ninjas. While we won’t master the art of using the command
line in this section (that can only come with years and experience), we will definitely become more confident.

First, let’s talk about moving from one place to another within the Linux filesystem. Specifically, by “Linux
filesystem”, I’m referring to the default structure of the various folders (also referred to as “directories”) contained
within your Ubuntu installation. The Linux filesystem contains many important directories, each with their own
designated purpose, which we’ll talk about in more detail in the book. Before we can explore that further, we’ll
need to learn how to navigate from one directory to another. The first command we’ll cover in this section relative
to navigating the filesystem will clarify the directory you’re currently working from. For that, we have
the  pwd  command.

The pwd command

pwd stands for print working directory, and shows you where you currently are in the filesystem. If you run it,
you may see output such as this:

Figure 4.1: Viewing the current working directory

In this example, when I ran pwd, the output informed me that my current working directory is  /home/jay . This is
known as your home directory and, by default, every user has one. This is where all the files for your user account
will reside by default. Sure, you can create files anywhere you’d like, even outside your home directory if you have
permission to do so or you use sudo. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. As you’ll learn in
this article, the Linux filesystem has a designated place for just about everything. But your home
directory, located at  /home/<username> , is yours. You own it, you control it—it’s your home on the server. In the
early 2000s, Linux installations with a graphical user interface even depicted your home directory with an icon of a
house.

Typically, files that you create in your home directory will have permission string similar to this:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 jay  jay      0 Jul  5 14:10 testfile.txt 

You can see by default, files you create in your home directory are owned by your user, your group, and are
readable by all three categories (user, group, and other).

The cd command
To change our current directory and navigate to another, we can use the cd command along with a path we’d like
to move to:

cd /etc 

Now, I haven’t gone over the file and directory layout yet, so I just randomly picked the etc directory. The forward
slash at the beginning designates the beginning of the filesystem. More on that later. Now, we’re in
the  /etc  directory, and our command prompt has even changed as well:

Figure 4.2: Command prompt and pwd command after changing a directory

As you could probably guess, the  cd  command stands for change directory, and it’s how you move your working
directory from one to another while navigating around. You can use the following command, for example, to return
back to the home directory:

cd /home/<user> 

In fact, there are several ways to return home, a few of which are demonstrated in the following screenshot:
 Figure 4.3: Other ways of navigating to the home directory

The first command,  cd - , doesn’t actually have anything to do with your home directory specifically. It’s a neat
trick to return you to whatever directory you were in most previously. For me, the  cd –  command took me to the
previous directory I was just in, which just so happened to be  /home/jay . The second command,  cd
/home/jay , took me directly to my home directory since I called out the entire path. The last command,  cd ~ ,
also took me to my home directory. This is because  ~  is shorthand for the full path to your home directory, so you
don’t really ever have to type out the entire path to  /home/<user> . You can just refer to that path simply as  ~ .

The ls command
Another essential command is  ls . The  ls  command lists the contents of the current working directory. We
probably don’t have any contents in our home directory yet. But if we navigate to  /etc  by running  cd /etc , as
we did earlier, and then execute  ls , we’ll see that the  /etc< /span> directory has a number of files in it. Go
ahead and try it yourself and see:

cd /etc

ls 

We didn’t actually have to change our working directory to /etc just to list the contents. We could’ve just
executed the following command:

ls /etc 

Even better, we can run:

ls -l /etc 

This gives us the contents in a long list, which I think is much easier to understand. It will show each directory or file
entry on its own line, along with the permission string. But you probably already must be knowing  ls  as well
as  ls -l  so I won’t go into too much more detail here. The  -l  portion of the  ls  command in that example is
known as an argument. I’m not referring to an argument such as the ever-ensuing debate in the Linux community
over which command-line text editor is the best between  vim  and  emacs  (it’s clearly  vim ).
Instead, I’m referring to the concept of an argument in shell commands that allow you to override the defaults, or
feed options to the command in some way, such as in this example, where we format the output of  ls  to be in a
long list.

The rm command
The  rm  command is another one that we touched on in, when we were discussing manually removing the home
directory of a user that was removed from the system. So, at this point, you’re probably well aware of that
command and what it does (it removes files and directories). It’s a potentially dangerous command, as you could
use it to accidentally remove something that you shouldn’t have. We used the following command to remove the
home directory of user  dscully :

rm -r /home/dscully 

As you can see, we’re using the  -r  argument to alter the behavior of the  rm  command, which, by default,
doesn’t remove directories but only files. The  -r  argument instructs  rm  to remove everything recursively, even if
it’s a directory. The  -r  argument will also remove subdirectories of the path as well, so you’ll definitely want to be
careful with this command. As I’ve mentioned earlier in the book, if you use  sudo  with  rm , you can
hypothetically delete your entire Ubuntu installation!

Another option offered by  rm  is the  -f  argument which is short for force, and it tells  rm  not to prompt before
removing things. This argument won’t be needed as often, and use cases for it are outside the scope of this article.
But keep in mind that it exists, should you need it.
The touch command
Another foundational command that’s good to know is  touch , which actually serves two purposes. First,
assuming you have permission to do so in your current working directory, the  touch  command will create an
empty file if it doesn’t already exist. Second, the  touch  command will update the modification time of a file or
directory if it does already exist:

Figure 4.4: Experimenting with the touch command

To illustrate this, in the related screenshot, I ran several commands. First, I ran the following command to create an
empty file:

touch testfile.txt  

That file didn’t exist before, so when I ran  ls -l afterward, it showed the newly created file with a size of 0 bytes.
Next, I ran the touch testfile.txt  command again a minute later, and you can see in the screenshot that the
modification time went from  15:12  to  15:13 .

When it comes to viewing the contents of a file, we’ll get to that later on in the book, Mastering Ubuntu Server,
Third Edition. And there are definitely more commands that we’ll need to learn to build the basis of our foundation.
But for now, let’s take a break from the foundational concepts to understand the Linux filesystem layout better.

Summary
There are more Linux commands than you will never be able to memorize. Most of us just memorize our favorite
commands and variations of commands. You’ll develop your own menu of these commands as you learn and
expand your knowledge. In this article, we covered many of the foundational commands that are, for the most part,
essential. Commands such as grep ,  cat ,  cd ,  ls , and others were explored this time around.

About
Jeremy “Jay” La Croix is a technologist and open-source enthusiast, specializing in Linux. Jay is currently the director
of Cloud Services, Adaptavist. He has a net field experience of 20 years across different firms as a Solutions
Architect and holds a master’s degree in Information Systems Technology Management from Capella University.   

In addition, Jay also has an active Linux-focused YouTube channel with over 186K followers and 15.9M views,
available at LearnLinux.tv, where he posts instructional tutorial videos and other Linux-related content.

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