Basic terminal commands in Ubuntu for beginers

Hello everyone,

Today we are here with major basics. May be one will say "basics? seriously? I am expert of computers" and blah blah blah. But basics are important factor in everything. We just can't go advanced mode without any knowledge of basics. So here we are telling few basic terminal things which are very useful for noobs and experts too (consider it as a revision).

How to open Terminal? ohh it's just too difficult. In ubuntu press ctrl+alt+T and terminal window will be there (alternatively you can open it from applications menu). Let's say you wanna go in root mode so what we gonna do is open terminal and type in:

sudo su

then it will ask for your password and you will have access as root user.

Again if you wanna change your password (ofcource when you know your current password) just type in terminal :

passwd

It will ask you too type in your current password and new password and you are set to go.

Wanna make a folder in your files system? you can easily do it via nautilus file manager but you can also do it from terminal by typing following :

mkdir /home/username/new_folder

Where mkdir is command from making new folder, username is your pc name (like john, jj, dude, smith, Czechoslovakia, etc, etc), new_folder can be any name of the folder.

 When you can create folder, then of course you can destroy them too. Nautilus is again the best option but why not play with terminal.

rm -rf /home/username/folder_name

Beware of this command. One wrong move in this thing and you can loose your porn folder. I know it is very serious to loose porn folder but it would be worse if you loose your whole system (including the porn folder :P). This command will delete the folder and it's sub-folders if specified correctly. by any chance if you typed  rm -rf /    then just say bye bye to whole system. (we strongly suggest you to use nautilus for deleting folders.)

Now how about copying a folder or file to other place. You can do it in terminal by typing :

cp source destination

Let's take an example we want to copy an image.png file from /home/pictures folder to /home/documents folder then we can do it by :

cp /home/pictures/image.png /home/documents/

Now, you want to install some software via terminal but you just can't find package even after typing proper command then you need to refresh your available repositories by typing :

sudo apt-get update

This command will completely update your repositories so any further package installations will done smoothly.

There are upgrades to all your package or some of your packages, though in ubuntu you will be notified by software updater. But why not do it through teminal :

sudo apt-get upgrade

 This command will upgrade all your packages whose upgrades are available.

There is new version of Ubuntu available and you want to upgrade to that without doing a clean install again and again. Simple open up terminal and type in :

sudo apt-get dist-update

It will upgrade your Ubuntu to newer version (if available).

Now you have updated your repositories and you ready to install some softwares, open up terminal and type in :

sudo apt-get install pkg_name

For example one want to install firefox then just type :

sudo apt-get install firefox

 In the same way you can uninstall packages by simply typing :

sudo apt-get purge pkg_name

 A package you are trying to install is broken, or lacking dependencies then type in :

sudo apt-get -f install

This command will try to fix the broken packages.

Well these are some basic commands for Ubuntu. Of course it's not a complete list. We will post about more commands in upcoming post. And yes why not finding some by yourselves too? give them a try and Linux won't disappoint you in any way. So stay tuned with us for more basics, Till then, ciao.