Moving around in *nix

Well...you decided use *nix! I am proud of you. I am a beginner to *nix myself but I would like to share what I know. It all may seem daunting at first but it really isn't all that bad. If you are familiar with DOS it isn't all that hard to get. I am going to assume you have a computer with it installed so I will not go into how to install it. There are a few different shells that you can use but the only one I know how to use is Bash (Bourne Again SHell). The first thing you should do is to login. *Remember* choose a good password; make it at least 8 characters long that uses a combination of upper and lowercase letter along with numbers and meta-characters. When you login, if this is your machine, type: pwconv . It will shadow your passwords so other users can cannot rip them off and crack them. If you use the ls command it will give you a list of all the files in the current working directory. Using the -a switch along with it will show all of the hidden files with them. Using the the -l switch will list the file permissions. If you want to use both switches just combine them
ex: ls -al . If you ever have to many files to display on screen at once pipe the cammand to more. Ex: ls -l | more . It will only display one page at a time so you will be able to read them. To change directories just type cd followed by a space and the directory you would like to switch too. To read a file use the cat command.
Ex: cat (filename) | more . It is usually neccesary to pipe it through more b/c the files usually have more than one screen of text. To delete a file all you have to do is type: rm (filename) and all you have to do to delete a directory is type rmdir (directoryname). To logout all you have to do is type logout or if it is you machine to shutdow type: init 0 or type init 6 to reboot. Init stands for one of the many runlevels *nix has. I know this is incredibly short but it should help you out a little bit in moving around the *nix filesystem.

Good little introduction. Are you going to write more, as this would be the first part of a mult-post article?

Peace,

Raz0rSharp

nice and handy, dont forget to mention that if you need to perform a file action on a file with blank spaces in the name (this is too common in the windows world and if you run samba... be ready to deal with it) you must encase the file name in quotation marks so that the shell interprets it as one entry and not multiple....

EX: chmod 770 /home/bob/"file with spaces in name" (chmod is simply the command to change permissions or mode rather)

blank spaces can trip up newbies with a vengeance!

I like to type pwd, which stands for present working directory. Cause sometimes I get lost.

Also, ls --help for a complete list of ls commands.