Learn to Talk to Your Machine
Objective: Navigate and manipulate your system, edit files, and track changes using only the command line.
The graphical interface is training wheels. Real IT work happens in the terminal. Your job is to navigate the filesystem, manage files, edit configurations, and track your work using only CLI.
Learn the Linux filesystem hierarchy: what /etc, /var, /home, /tmp, /usr, and /bin are for. Pick nano or vim and get to a point where you can open a config file, change a value, and save it without panicking.
Starting now, your course-notes/ folder is a Git repository.
pwd Where am I right now? ls What's in this directory? cd Move to a different directory mkdir Create a directory touch Create an empty file cp Copy files or directories mv Move or rename files or directories rm Delete files. Linux has no recycle bin. cat Display file contents man Read the manual page for any command sudo Run a command as administrator chmod Change file permissions chown Change file ownership grep Search for text inside files find Search for files by name or type df Check disk space top / htop See what's running git init / add / commit Track your work locally - 1
Create the full ~/company/ structure (hr, engineering, sales, finance, and it, each with 3 .txt files) using only the terminal. No file manager.
- 2
Add at least one line of text to each file using echo and output redirection (>).
- 3
Copy the entire company directory to /tmp/company-backup.
- 4
Find every .txt file in the company directory using the find command.
- 5
Search for a specific word across all files using grep.
- 6
Check disk space and memory usage. Write the output to system-report.txt.
- 7
Open system-report.txt in nano or vim. Add a header line: "System Report - [today's date]". Save and exit.
- 8
Initialize your course-notes/ directory as a Git repo. Add all existing files. Make your first commit: "initial commit - phases 1-3".