Linux Basics

What Is Linux?

Linux is an operating system's kernel. You might have heard of UNIX. Well, Linux is a UNIX clone. But it was actually created by Linus Torvalds from Scratch.
Linux is free and open-source, that means that you can simply change anything in Linux and redistribute it in your own name!
There are several Linux Distributions, commonly called “distros”.

• Ubuntu Linux
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Linux Mint
• Debian
• Fedora

Linux is Mainly used in servers. About 90% of the internet is powered by Linux servers. This is because Linux is fast, secure, and free! The main problem of using Windows servers are their cost.
This is solved by using Linux servers. The OS that runs in about 80% of the smartphones in the world, Android, is also made from the Linux kernel. Most of the viruses in the world run on Windows, but not on Linux!

Linux Shell or “Terminal”

So, basically, a shell is a program that receives commands from the user and gives it to the OS to process, and it shows the output.
Linux's shell is its main part. Its distros come in GUI (graphical user interface), but basically, Linux has a CLI (command line interface).
In this tutorial, we are going to cover the basic commands that we use in the shell of Linux.

Linux Commands

1. pwd — When you first open the terminal, you are in the home directory of your user. To know which directory you are in, you can use the “pwd” command.
It gives us the absolute path, which means the path that starts from the root. The root is the base of the Linux file system.
It is denoted by a forward slash( / ). The user directory is usually something like "/home/username".