Shell

General

The Shell or commandline is program to interact with a given computer (or supercomputer). Contrary to the graphical user interface most desktop machines use, the shell is very basic and requires the user to have a certain knowledge on what commands there are and how to use them. However, even with a few basic commands, the shell can be a very powerful tool. Combining this power with the fact that the shell itself uses almost uses no resources, is the reason, why it is still in use on (nearly) every (super)computer.

A common shell is the bash (Bourne Again SHell), which comes with nearly every unix-based operating system. Others unix shells include the sh, csh, tcsh, zsh, ksh. All these have very similar commands/syntax, which will be described below.

Windows has the cmd or the PowerShell (ps), which is different syntaxwise and will not be covered here, since most supercomputers run unix systems.

Usage

Enter a command, hit return and read/wait for the answer :-P

Navigating the Unix File System

Linux Command	DOS Command	Description
pwd	cd	“Print Working Directory”. Shows the current location in the directory tree.
cd	cd, chdir	“Change Directory”. When typed all by itself, it returns you to your home directory.
cd directory	cd directory	Change into the specified directory name. Example: cd /usr/src/linux
cd ~		“~” is an alias for your home directory. It can be used as a shortcut to your “home”, or other directories relative to your home.
cd ..	cd..	Move up one directory. For example, if you are in /home/vic and you type “cd ..”, you will end up in /home.
cd -		Return to previous directory. An easy way to get back to your previous location!
ls	dir /w	List all files in the current directory, in column format.
ls directory	dir directory	List the files in the specified directory. Example: ls /var/log
ls -l	dir	List files in “long” format, one file per line. This also shows you additional info about the file, such as ownership, permissions, date, and size.
ls -a	dir /a	List all files, including “hidden” files. Hidden files are those files that begin with a “.”, e.g. The .bash_history file in your home directory.
ls -ld directory		A “long” list of “directory”, but instead of showing the directory contents, show the directory's detailed information. For example, compare the output of the following two commands: ls -l /usr/bin ls -ld /usr/bin
ls /usr/bin/d*	dir d*.*	List all files whose names begin with the letter “d” in the /usr/bin directory.

FAQs

A short info with a good basic command reference A longer linux-shell tutorial