Linux CLI for Beginners, or, Fear Not the Linux Command Line!
Monday, December 15 2008 @ 01:54 PM EST Contributed by: sde
Most recent converts to Linux spend most of their time in the GUI -- the graphical desktop (whether Gnome, or KDE, or XFCE, or some other interface) that's made to look and act somewhat like Windows and Mac.
But if you spend all your time in the GUI, you're missing out. The Linux command-line gives you a lot of power -- it lets you do tasks that are difficult or impossible with the GUI, and for tasks that you do a lot, such as launching the same applications everyday, it's often faster. When you read about using the command line, which is often abbreviated to CLI for "command-line interface", they usually mean typing commands into a terminal. This is a term leftover from the olden days of interfacing with mainframes via dumb terminals which had no processing power of their own; they were pretty much just monitors and keyboards. When we refer to a Linux terminal it's a software application, and if you want to get technical it's a terminal emulator.
So the first step is finding a terminal on your Linux system, and I haven't seen a Linux distribution yet that didn't include several by default. On KDE look in your start menus for Konsole, and on Gnome look for Terminal or Gnome-Terminal. There are dozens of different terminals: xterm, aterm, rxvt, eterm, and many more. Apparently Linux geeks love terminals.
