The shutdown and reboot commands: a downloader’s boon(and of course sudo too)

So now on to switching off your computer using the command line. Note that all these require sudo privilege to work. The commands are pretty self-explainatory but their options are what really is the power of these commands. Of course, shutdown is the best and poweroff, halt and reboot simply call the shutdown command with [...]

What does that file contain? Ask cat!

This is going to be a short entry that deals with a very small command: cat. It’s basically used to manipulate the contents of a file in the shell. But do not under-estimate the power of cat by it’s seemingly small definition! To print out the contents of a file try, cat try That’s it! [...]

Creating and deleting files and directories

So, next up I think it’s time we learn how to create stuff using the command line. Creating files To create a file, the command is touch. For example, touch try1 creates an empty file try1 in the present working directory. Multiple arguments can be passed to touch like touch try1 try2 try3 and so [...]

The ls command: Know what’s beneath you

So we’ve done one command that’s the pwd. Next up ls. ls is used for listing the contents of the present directory. Go ahead and type ls in the shell. You’ll get a list of file and folders in the present directory. The best part of ls is that there are various options that let [...]

The pwd command: Find out where you are

Before we begin, here are a few important things: 1.I use bash(bourne-again shell) to demonstrate the functionality of these commands. So, if you use a different shell, check the documentation of that respective shell. 2.Also, I use ubuntu. So some commands may not necessarily be available across all distros. For example, apt-get is used to [...]

Live in the command line

Well I’ve been thinking about this for a long time “Won’t it be cool to write on the various linux commands that I know? Won’t it be useful for some newbie who wants to learn more on this? Plus terminal is something I like a lot. So why not?” So, in adherence to this thought, [...]

Finally a non-CS from my year checks out ubuntu

Today, I saw that one of my friends, Vineeth Mohan(http://bujrox.wordpress.com), of Electronics And Communication Engineering, in my year, went ahead and did something: checking out Ubuntu(http://bujirox.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/ubuntulinuxvlc/). This is an encouraging thing I must say. Most people are of the opinion that Ubuntu (or Linux in general) is meant only for computer science and information technology [...]