Backend and Infrastructure

Moving Around the Command Line

Sprout Video

The command line can be a scary place for someone not familiar with interacting with a computer through text-only. We are so used to using GUIs to point and click our way through tasks. In this series we'll walk through some of the most common command line tasks to help you understand what is going on and be able to do some cool tricks yourself.

This is the first video in a series that shows basic command line usage for *nix systems, such as Linux, Mac OS, and on Windows, using applications like Cygwin. This video shows the following commands and spends the most time explaining how to move around your file structure from the command line:

  • pwd
  • ls (and ls -al)
  • less
  • cd
  • man
  • clear

Note: this video was originally released August 31, 2009 on Lullabot.com.

This tutorial is part of the Command Line Basics course.