Starting Up the Terminal

The terminal can be found under Accessories > Terminal. When it first launches, you will see something similar to that shown in Figure A-1.

Figure A-1. The terminal window.

You will see a blinking cursor immediately preceded by a string ending in a $. The first word in that string is your user name, followed by the @ symbol. After the @ the hostname of your computer is listed followed by the name of the folder you are currently in (currently your home folder), which is represented by a ~ symbol.

There are many dozens of commands. Here are a few, broken down by category.