Getting Started with Bash

8 min readDec 8, 2017

This is a beginner-oriented post intended to get you comfortable using your *nix-based operating system’s command line for common tasks. More advanced features will be the topic of future posts.

The command line is a great way to quickly and efficiently work with files, and sometimes it’s the only way to accomplish certain tasks. Being able to use the command line to quickly create and modify files is essential for developers in nearly every field.

If you’re not already familiar with BASH (Bourne-Again SHell), this post is meant to get you started navigating your computer from the command line. I cover some basic commands and shortcuts here, but you’ll want to experiment on your own and follow the links I provide at the bottom if you would like to take on more advanced tasks.

If you want to follow along, open up your terminal on macOS or any flavor of Linux (I can’t guarantee these commands will work with Windows Powershell. Also, keep in mind that only Windows 10 has a BASH shell).

Some Basic Commands

There are a handful of bash commands you will use often, so let’s get familiar with them right off the bat.

pwd — You can print the directory you are in using pwd (print working directory)
ls — View the contents of your current directory with ls. You can view a long-form list with ls -l or view hidden files with ls -a. If you want to see what’s in a different directory, provide that directory’s path as the first argument to the ls command.
touch — You can create a file using touch: touch file and if you type touch file again, the date/time modified for that file will be updated to the time you touched it.
echo — Start interacting with the terminal by printing to standard output using echo: echo "Hello". You can also use echo to write to file like this: echo "Some random text" > file2, which will both create the file for you and write to it. If you try this again, it will overwrite your previous text. If you would like to to append text to this file, you will need to use » like this: echo "Some more text" >> file2.
cat — If you would like to take a look at the file you just wrote to, type cat file2.
ctrl + r — Search commands previously used

To practice using these commands, you can follow these steps in your interpreter:

Open your command line interpreter and print your working directory to get oriented
List the contents of the directory you’re in
Create a few new files and then list the contents of your directory again
Type “hello world” or something equally silly to standard output
Write some text to a file and look at the file’s contents in the terminal
List files using long (-l) argument, touch an existing file, then list files again to see changes to the last time modified

Working With Directories

cd is the command used to change directories. It takes one parameter - the absolute or relative filepath you would like to move to (cd with no parameters takes you to your home directory).

Navigate to your home directory cd or cd ~
Navigate to a specific directory cd path/to/my/directory or cd my_directory
Navigate up a level cd ..
Navigate up more than one level cd ../..
Navigate to previous directory cd -
mkdir — Make a new directory mkdir directory_name
rmdir — Delete an empty directory rmdir directory_name
Delete a directory and its contents rmdir -rf directory_name
List subdirectories ls -d */

Practice these commands by following along:

Move to your home directory and print the directory name
List the contents of your home directory and move to a subdirectory
Move back to where you were (home directory) and list all subdirectories
Navigate to a directory several folders deep, then return using the absolute path of your home directory
Create a subdirectory “new_dir” and delete it. Check that it’s gone by listing out the parent directory contents
Create a subdirectory “my_dir” and add files or folders to it, then delete it

Working with Files

Although files and directories are technically the same thing in *nix operating systems, some different commands are used for working with files.

less and cat — Read a file with less less file.txt or cat cat file.txt Less is a file reader that returns a single screen at a time and allows the user to scroll through the file. Cat is short for concatenate, and outputs results to standard output, and it can be used to quickly view the contents of files as long as you don’t need to scroll.
> — Empty a file without deleting it > file.txt
rm — Remove a file rm file.txt or all files rm *
mv — Move a file mv file_name directory_name You can also use mv to rename a file or directory like this: mv file.txt file2.txt. If you’d like to batch rename files, use rename: rename –v 'dir/file/path/' *
cp — Copy a file cp file_name directory_name
open — Open a file using the default program with open file.txt or with a specific program program_name open file.txt (eg. nano open file.txt). You can can also simply open a program by typing in the program name like this: chrome. You’ll need to make sure the program is already in your $PATH variable by editing your profile (typically located in /etc/profile). You can check your path variable by typing echo $PATH.

Text Editors — Vim, Emacs, Nano, Pico

Linux and Unix provide an abundance of useful text editors, each of which is extremely feature-rich. I can’t tell you which ones are best, but I like using Vim. Beginners will likely appreciate the ease of getting started with nano or Emacs.

nano or pico — Edit a file using nano filename or pico filename. Nano is a clone of Pico and both have similar functionality.
vi or vim — Opening a file for editing in Vim vi file.txt or vim file.txt Vi is a text editor created in the 1970s for Unix and was cloned and augmented in 1991, resulting in Vi IMproved (VIM). It’s a bit tricky to learn, but once you do, you’ll likely be hooked. It’s quite powerful and extensible. Follow the official tutorial to get started with Vim. Just remember, to close Vim you will need to be in edit mode (hit escape if you aren’t) and type :q! to quit without changes or :wq to write changes to file and quit (SHIFT-z-z does the same thing).
emacs — Files can be opened in GNU Emacs in the same way as Vim or Nano emacs file.txt. Emacs is another text editor, which I have yet to use much. There are many people who love it, and it has some additional functionality that Vim doesn’t have by default, so it might be worth checking out.

If you would like to try these commands out for yourself, follow along:

Create a file “my_file” and type or paste in some text. Hipster Ipsum is a good source for nonsense text
Use less and cat to read to the file’s contents. Empty the file you created, then delete it
Create a new file “file.txt” and rename it to “file1.txt”
Create several text files, then rename them using rename
Open one of these files from the command line using your IDE of choice. Type in some text then save and close
Reopen the last file using nano or pico and modify it
Reopen the last file again using Vim or Emacs, make some changes (to make changes in Vim, you’ll need to switch to insert mode by typing i and ESC to go back to command mode) and exit
Play around by adding hipster ipsum text to each of the files you created and cat the results to standard output

Shortcuts for Working With Text

There are a few handy shortcuts that will save you a lot of time and energy in the command line.

ctrl-A — Move to beginning of current line
ctrl-E — Move to end of current line
Alt-b — Moves back one word
Alt-f — Moves forward one word
Ctrl + u — Cut everything before the cursor to the clipboard
Ctrl + k — Cut everything after the cursor to the clipboard
Ctrl + y — Paste from the clipboard that Ctrl + u and Ctrl + k save their data to
Ctrl + t — Swap the two characters before the cursor
Ctrl + w — Delete the word to the left of the cursor
Ctrl + l or clear — Clear the screen

Searching

There are a ton of handy ways to search using the command line, which I can almost guarantee will come in super handy at some point

find — Find a file find . –name "*.txt"
locate — Find a directory using locate locate directory_name
grep — Find a text string in files grep -Pri search_term filepath/file.txt
egrep — Search text and return lines that match a pattern egrep [command line options] <pattern> [path]

For practice searching, try these steps:

Search for one of the files you created previously using find
Search for a directory you know exists
Search for for some of the hipster ipsum you previously pasted using grep and egrep

Multiple Commands and Command Reuse

You can also string commands together on a single line, either separately or in conjunction

In a single line command1; command2; command3
Run commands together command1 && command2
!$ — Reuse last item (eg. cd !$ or echo !$)
!! — Reuse previous command sudo !! (history also shows the history of commands used)
Loop over a set of files using a for loopfor f in *.txt; do echo "some text"; done

Getting Help

Bash provides extensive documentation for each all commands, all of which can be accessed from the command line

help — Finding out how to use a command command --help
man — Finding manual pages man or man command
Search man pages using a keyword man -k search_term

Useful Links

Codecademy’s List of Command Line Commands
Bash Shortcuts
Ryan’s Tutorial’s Cheat Sheet
Free Code Camp Post on the Command Line

Originally published at danstrong.tech.