Where am I, and what is here?

The terminal is where you get the computer to do things by typing. At every moment you are inside some folder, and the commands you type work relative to it. The first three commands are always the same: where am I (pwd), what is here (ls), go somewhere else (cd).

1pwd
2ls
3cd documents
4cd ..
5cat readme.txt

cd documents goes into the documents of the folder you are in; cd .. goes up one folder (.. means "one up", . means "here"). cat writes a file's contents to the screen.

A file's place is written as a path. A path that starts with / describes it from the very top (/home/ada/notes.txt) and points at the same file wherever you are. A path that does not start with / begins at the folder you are in (notes.txt, projects/app/main.py).

Tasks