Linux Phrasebook, Second Edition

2. Navigating Your File System

This chapter introduces the basic commands you’ll find yourself using several times every day. Think of these as the hammer, screwdriver, and pliers that a carpenter keeps in the top of his toolbox. After you learn these commands, you can start controlling your shell and finding out all sorts of interesting things about your files, folders, data, and environment. In particular, you’ll be learning about some of the metadata—the data describing your data—that Linux has to keep track of, and it may just surprise you how much there is.

Note

When I updated this book for its second edition, I removed the section about mkdir -v (which shows you what mkdir is doing as it does it) and rm -v (which does the same thing, but ...