I just discovered a new command that I’m unfamiliar with. Now what? How do I know how to use the command properly? How do I even find out what the command is for?

Lost. That’s how I felt when I first saw the Linux CLI. Opening a terminal was easy enough, but then I was faced with an empty screen and a cursor. I didn’t know what to do or where to begin.

When first looking up how to use certain Linux commands, I remember feeling overwhelmed and confused by all the different descriptions, syntaxes, and examples provided; after all the reading, I would still be uncertain of how to properly use the command which resulted in a lot of trial & error.

Now that some basic commands have been covered, we can dive into some of their common options. Options are a type of argument you can add to a command that changes the behavior of that command. This could be a wide range of things: altering the output, changing which files you’d like to use, executing a dry run, and so on.

I remember when I was first starting out with Linux - I would only look up instructions on how to do specific tasks. I didn’t invest much time at all trying to gain any foundational understanding. However, after reading enough material, I began to recognize the same commands over and over. At this point, I decided to research the most common Linux commands to gain familiarity with them; this way, I didn’t have to look them up every time I read an article which resulted in a dozen browser tabs. It’s been over a decade since then and, now, it is time for me to contribute my own beginners version.

It’s said that everything on a computer is either a file or process. In a strictly binary way, all computer data is just a combination of 1s and 0s; therefore, files are simply data that’s stored, typically on the hard disk or in memory (RAM), while processes are the manipulation of that data - usually in the CPU. Here, we’ll be reviewing different ways to view those files on a Linux system.

Permissions are one of the first lines of defense when securing a Linux system. From my days as a LAMP-stack admin at a web host, I remember frequently explaining different PHP handlers to customers - both their security implications and trade offs. The security consideration was largely due to system permissions.