beginners info

[Ray Strode]

cd has been said several times, but there are a few
shortcuts you might want to know.  ~ is your home
directory, so typing 
cd ~ 
will take you straight to your home directory.
bash also allows just
cd
to do the same.  to go to someone elses home directory
try
cd ~somebodyelse
to go to the directory that you were in before the current directory
cd -
also checkout pushd and popd

If you need help on a particular command type
man command
for more specific help, a lot of gnu tools support
info command
if you don't know the name of the command but you know
what it does try
man -k whatitdoes
or 
apropos whatitdoes

cat is useful
to write a file you could do
cat << done > foo.txt
foo
bar
baz 
quux
done

then to display the file you could do
cat foo.txt

if the file was too big you could do
more foo.txt 
and it will show you the file one page at a time.
or you could use 
less foo.txt
which is a tad smarter, it lets you go backward and 
forward in a file.

grep is also useful.  It searchs for things.
grep "bar" foo.txt 
will display bar because it's in foo.txt
grep -n "ba" foo.txt
will display what line bar is in and what line baz is in.
grep -v "bar" foo.txt 
will display every line but bar

to pipe the output of one command to the input of another use |
ie.
cat foo.txt | grep "foo"
will send the contents of foo.txt to grep and grep will search for the
word foo within it.

lots more stuff too... see man bash for the details.

ummm one other useful command is ps
ps -ef 
will display every running process.

gotta go.
Ray