Well, we’ve talked about what the command line is…

…so what can you do with it?
Well, given the name, you can do ‘commands’.

There’s lots of built in commands, but we’ll start with a simple one. Open a terminal session (I’ll leave it up to you to find the one particular to your version of Linux®. It generally has the word ‘term’ in the name.)

The terminal has a ‘prompt’, which is a place to type your commands. They usually combine the name of the computer with your username. So it could look like:

  
 Alpha:~ computerlamp$_

So for our first command, we’re going to try echo. This is a fun command, it repeats any words or sentences you give it to the terminal.

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ echo Hi There
Hi There

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ echo How now brown cow.
How now brown cow.

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ echo Star Wars Rocks!
Star Wars Rocks!

Another fun command is rev. If I type it at the terminal, it looks like:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ rev

Type any string you want and hit enter. You’ll see the reverse of that string show up. For example:

Alpha:~ computerlamp$ rev
abcdef
fedcba

So now it seems you’re stuck in a loop. You need to get out the rev and back to the prompt. You can do this one of two ways, you can hold down control and hit C or D.