Title of script: Basic Commands in Linux

Author: Anirban Roy Choudhury

Keywords: Shell,commands,options,help,apropos,man
Resources for the tutorial:File:Resources for Basic Commands in linux.zip

Visual Cue Narration

Display Slide 1 Dear friends, welcome to a spoken tutorial on the Linux Operating System.
In this tutorial, we will study some basic commands.
Display Slide 2 I am using Linux Operating System
We assume that you know how to get started with the Linux operating system.
If you are interested, it is available through another spoken tutorial, on the
website http://spoken-tutorial.org.
In this tutorial, we will see what are commands and what is a command
Display slide 3
interpreter.
Then we will learn about how to find help in Linux using the man command.
Display slide 4 Now the first question is, "what are commands?".
In simplest terms we can say that Linux commands are words that when
keyed in cause some actions to take place.
Linux commands are seldom more than four character in length like ls, who,
ps etc.
The commands are in lower case and they are case sensitive. Let us see an
example .
Go to the applications menu.
Open a terminal
Select accessories and then click on terminal from the available options
window
Now we can see a prompt ($) and a cursor blinking next to it. This is where we
need to type in a command.
Type at the
Type in the words who and press enter.
command prompt
who
and press enter

We can see the name of the users logged in. Actually we have just executed a
command called who which shows who are logged into the system.
But which entity is converting these commands which are nothing more than a
Display Slide 5
few letters into actions?
This is the job of the Command Interpreter, also called the shell.
We can define a shell as a program that acts as the interface between us and
the Linux system, allowing us to enter commands for the operating system to
execute.
On Linux it’s quite feasible to have multiple shells installed, with different users
able to pick the one they prefer.
On Linux, the standard shell that is always installed as /bin/sh is called bash
 (the GNU Bourne-Again SHell), the GNU suite of tools.
The commands we would be covering in this tutorial are generic and can run
on most of the Linux shells, with slight variations.
Nevertheless, we would be using the bash as the shell for demonstration in
this tutorial.
It is because bash is the most popular shell and portable to almost all UNIX.
Other shells include the Bourne shell (sh) which is the original Unix shell, C
Shell (csh) and Korn shell(ksh)
Type at the
command prompt

echo $SHELL To see which shell we are using go to the terminal