Bash and the Command Line for Beginners

01

What is the Command Line and Why Learn It?

Understand what the terminal, shell and Bash actually are, and why almost every developer and IT person ends up learning them.

~10 min 02

Getting Started: Opening a Terminal and Choosing a Shell

Open a terminal on Linux, macOS or Windows, check which shell you are running, read the prompt and type your first commands.

~10 min 03

Navigating the Filesystem

Learn how files and folders are organised on Linux and macOS, and how to move around confidently with pwd, ls and cd.

~9 min 04

Creating, Copying, Moving, and Deleting Files

Learn the everyday commands for managing files and folders: touch, mkdir, cp, mv and rm, plus wildcards for working with many files at once.

~9 min 05

Viewing and Reading File Contents

Learn to read files right in the terminal using cat, less, head and tail, plus handy tools like wc, file and diff.

~7 min 06

Understanding File Permissions and Ownership

Learn how Linux decides who can read, write or run a file, and how to change permissions and ownership with chmod and chown.

~9 min 07

Redirection, Pipes, and Combining Commands

Learn to send output to files, feed files into commands, and chain commands together with pipes. This is where the shell gets its real power.

~9 min 08

Searching and Finding Things: grep and find

Learn to search inside files for text with grep and find files across the system with find.

~9 min 09

Text Processing with sed and awk

Go beyond searching and start transforming text: find and replace with sed, column work with awk, plus sort, uniq and cut.

~9 min 10

Environment Variables, PATH, and Shell Configuration

Understand environment variables, how PATH lets you run commands from anywhere, and how to customise your shell with .bashrc and aliases.

~7 min 11

Quoting, Variables, and Command Substitution

Learn the difference between single and double quotes, how to escape special characters, and how to capture the output of one command inside another.

~7 min 12

Writing Your First Bash Script

Write, save and run your first Bash script, and understand the shebang line, executable permissions and basic script structure.

~7 min 13

Conditionals: Making Decisions in Scripts

Make your scripts decide things with if, elif, else, the test command and the case statement.

~8 min 14

Loops: Repeating Actions in Scripts

Repeat commands automatically with for, while and until loops, and control them with break and continue.

~7 min 15

Functions in Bash Scripts

Organise scripts into reusable functions, pass arguments to them and understand the difference between exit codes and printed output.

~6 min 16

Reading Input and Handling Script Arguments

Ask users for input with read, accept arguments and flags when a script is launched, and exit with meaningful status codes.

~6 min 17

Process Management and Job Control

See what is running on your system, stop misbehaving programs, and run tasks in the background while you keep working.

~7 min 18

Scheduling Tasks with Cron

Run scripts and commands automatically at set times with cron and its five-field schedule.

~7 min 19

Advanced Bash: Arrays, String Manipulation, and Regular Expressions

Level up your scripting with arrays, string tricks, arithmetic, pattern matching and here documents.

~6 min 20

Building a Real Project: Automated Backup Script

Combine everything from this course into one working script that backs up a folder, compresses it, timestamps it, logs its work and is ready to schedule.

~10 min 21

What to Learn Next

You finished the fundamentals of Bash and the command line. Here is where to go next depending on what you want to build or work with.

~7 min