Basic Commands

When you open a terminal window in linux you will automatically be in your home directory. To print your current directory

pwd

>/home/des

To go up one directory

cd ..

>/home

To go back home from whatever directory you are type cd

cd

List directory

ls

Long listing of directory

ls -l

Long listing including hidden files

ls -la

Long list directories only

ls -ld

Switch user

su

Add a user called des with a home folder /home/des

useradd -m -d /home/des des

Apply or change the password for a user account

passwd des

List users who are logged in to your machine

who

Check the id number of a user

id des

To count the number of files in freds home directory we can pipe ( | ) the results of ls -l into a wc -l command which counts the number of lines

ls -l /home/fred | wc -l

You could also use wc -l to count the number of lines ina text file

cat mytextfile | wc -l