Operation Manual

The Linux Command Line
152
Notes:
152
The operating system on your Raspberry Pi is a version of Linux. In all probability,
it looks a bit like Windows, or – more likely – like the Mac OS. It has a graphical
user interface (GUI) that allows you to interact with your folders and files by
double-clicking, right- or left-clicking, or dragging and dropping. If you want to
open a program, you look for it on a menu called something like “Applications”.
That’s all very well, but there is another way to interact with Linux: using the
command line interface (CLI). With the CLI there are no images; nothing to click
on. To get your computer to do something, you must type a properly constructed
text command. Often, you’ll only know that your command has been successfully
executed because your computer won’t respond. If it does respond, something
has gone wrong and it’s giving you an error message.
That sounds like hard work. Do we really want to bother with it? Yes, we do! For a
start, by default, some versions of Linux boot directly into the CLI. To open the
GUI, with all its lovely windows and menus, you then need to type the command
“startx” and press Return. But that’s by no means the only reason to get to grips
with the CLI.
With the command line you can do things that you can’t do using the GUI and you
can do things easily that are difficult in the GUI. Compared with the graphical
interface, the command line hardly uses any processing or graphics power, so it’s
great if you have heavy work for your computer to do. And, if you’re connecting
remotely to a Raspberry Pi that doesn’t have its own monitor, then you’ll have to
use the CLI.
If you’re new to Linux, you may not be familiar with the command line in general
and with Linux commands in particular (they’re sometimes similar to their Windows
equivalents, but often they’re completely different). This chapter is a quick
introduction to the magic of the command line. It contains everything you need to
get started.
The Linux Command Line
Chapter 6