Why is when I open a shell to type a command such as:
/boot/grub/menu.ls I get the response "no such file or directory"? That is not the only incident, I get the same response from other commands that I type in I know I have typed correctly, lots of times I copy and pase the command in the box. This has been going on for some time but now it's beginning to irritate me. What am I doing wrong?

On my machine, /boot/grub/menu.ls[t] isn't a command, but a file (a synthetic link in fact, but that's almost besides the point). In order to do something with it, you need to specify a program to use, so: will show you its contents.

What other commands have you tried which you aren't able to get to work as you expect?

Thanks for your reply, it's quite obvious I need to do some homework. I have been using Mepis in the gui mode as a substitute for windows and have been quite pleased with it, but now I need to delve a little deeper.

I'd suggest the RUTE guide for all things command line (you can get it as a pdf). I did a quick google search to find some good sites to learn about the command line, and specifically which programs are the most useful, but couldn't find anything (in under a minute! ), but this seemed like a fairly good place to start: http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/cli.html

I find that the programs I use most regularly are the obvious ones: ls, cd, rm, mv etc. But for file manipulation, I use the vim editor, which is fairly complicated to use, but powerful as a result. To view files more quickly I often use less (or more). cat is useful as a way of opening a file onto the terminal. the pipe command | (usually ctrl backslash) allows you to take the output of one file, and use that as the input to another, so to display all the processes currently running, but only for the user zathrus, I'd typewhere ps -ef shows all processes for all users, and then grep takes that output, and filters it for zathrus only.

The best way to learn is to use, so delve away

Enjoy!