Try some simple commands on the Terminal

Okey, after you’ve used a terminal emulator for the first time. Now we will try some simple commands on the terminal. This helps you become more familiar with using a terminal to work with the operating system.

Some simple commands on the terminal

Now we will try some very simple commands on the terminal as follows. Open the terminal emulator program on your computer and type the following commands into it.

Let’s type date command. This command displays the current time and date.

danie@linuxmint ~ $ date
Fri Jan 11 21:37:58 +07 2019

Let’s type another command, type cal. This command displays a calendar of the current month.

Try typing a command that most people are familiar with. That is the echo command. This command will print out the screen contents of the text. When you type it in the terminal window, it will print the text you just typed on the same window.

danie@linuxmint ~ $ echo "Hello, I'm Danie."
Hello, I'm Danie.

Command “history”

Now, if you press the up key, you will see the echo command you just typed. This is the command history. Most Linux operating systems will save the last 1000 commands you have typed on the terminal.

When you use the up/down arrow keys, you will see different commands that you typed earlier. If you want to see the entire command history that you typed, type the history command.

danie@linuxmint ~ $ history
1946 date
1947 cal
1948 echo "Hello, I'm Danie."
1949 history
danie@linuxmint ~ $

Exit the terminal

Of course, on the graphical interface, you can exit the terminal window by clicking on the x sign icon.

If on an environment like Linux server with a command line interface, you will need to type exit to exit the current terminal session.

danie@linuxmint ~ $ exit

By typing some simple commands above, I think you have begun to understand how to work on linux via the command line. The next article, I will talk more about commands on Linux.

(This is an article from my old blog that has been inactive for a long time, I don’t want to throw it away so I will keep it and hope it helps someone).