Linux Mint Essentials
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Chapter 4. An Introduction to the Terminal

So far in our adventure, we are yet to leave the comfort of Mint's graphical desktop environment. Our time with Mint so far has been spent clicking on icons, launching GUI applications, and working from within windows. For most people, there is little need to leave this comfort zone. Mint is an incredibly rich experience, and it may seem that the developers have thought of everything and included a graphical application to configure just about anything you can think of. However, for those who aspire to be an administrator of Linux systems or just want to achieve advanced skills, learning shell commands is definitely recommended. For some tasks, executing commands can actually save time. In this chapter, we'll learn the basics of the Linux shell and commands related to it.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Why should we use the terminal?
  • Accessing the shell
  • Executing commands
  • Navigating the filesystem
  • Managing files
  • The nano text editor
  • Reading manual pages with the man command
  • Searching for files
  • Using the watch command
  • Introduction to scripting