I am assuming I am calling the console by the correct name. ??

I am trying to learn as many commands as I can...however, I notice that almost no dos commands work at all... what is a good site to learn some basic linux commands? I have been searching the web and cant seem to find anything like that at all...

thanks for the help!

seeing as there are so many, and they can change depending on what all you selected to install, the best place to look is in /bin/ /sbin/ /usr/sbin/ /usr/bin/ and just sit back ls each dir, and then start man commandname and see what it does.

Did i understand correct: ls ? and man?

What is man for? I think i have figured out that ls is similar to dir in dos unless you meant something else...

What are the different main directories for? like /bin, /etc, and /root for instance?

ls means list, as in dir for dos/windows
man means manual, you will hear man pages a lot, meaning basically check the manual.
go here basic commands this is a list of the basic commands, along with there man pages for each, so you can get a general idea of what does what, and how to do it, before diving in with ls, and man.

man stands for manual pages.. if you type man command name, it will show you the manual pages of that command..
/bin is where most commands are found
/etc is mainly for configuration files for your system
/root is your root home directory, like /home for regular users.

Do a search on "man pages" and it will bring up many sites that have links to pages containing commands and man pages for them.

The directory tree goes something like this:

/ - this is the "root" directory. It's the highest directory level
/bin - Holds important system binaries: ls, cp, mount, etc
/boot - contains files that are used to boot
/dev - contains all the devices that allows communication to the hardware
/etc - contains system configuration files
/home - contains the users' home directories
/lib - has various important system libraries
/mnt - holds the mount points of various drives and paritions (ie /mnt/floppy is like a: in dos)
/opt - I have no idea. Must not be too important
/proc - Holds information from the kernel about the system
/root - This is root's (the superuser) home directory
/sbin - Holds important system binaries that should only be used by root: checking filesystems, shutting down, etc
/tmp - Temporary storage space
/usr - Has a structure much like / but is for user level programs
/var - contains system logs, mail, printer spools, and so on

its usually a place where you can install programs.. I think it stands for optional... but most place programs elsewhere...

That was nifty,

Chijtska,

You might want to pick up O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell. Between that book and the man pages, I really have never needed another reference for anything command line oriented.

Cheers,

Finegan

At CompUSA I found a good book that was very cheap... One of those learn linux in 24 hr type deals...

1 question tho....

how do you remove a directory when that directory has a number of files and/or directories in them? i have tried rm, rd, and rmdir but none of those will work....

thanks for the help

"rm -r"

The r stands for recursive. Check the man page on rm for other options. If you don't want to be asked about removing every file, use "rm -rf" but BE VERY CAREFUL, especially if you are doing that as root. One typo could wipe your whole filesystem.

Youdidnt just mean: rm -rf /root doing this as root and it would wipe out your entire system????!!!! man, thats a scary thought...

yeah.. if you accidently typed rm -r / somedirectory, that would wipe out your / directory in which everything is under. notice the space after / and somedirectory... that is why you would want to be careful... and it should look like this rm -r /somedirectory if you wanted to just delete somedirectory.

if you are talking about commands then

open konq and type man:/ in the location bar

I typed konq... but got: no such command ?????

anyways...

I am looking for a command to find certain commands and programs...how do i do that in the console?

The ability to lookup linux commands and definitions will be added to this site soon.

--jeremy