Section 5: Command Line

Question 1

What is the general order of command syntax?

Answer 1

first word is the command and the rest are the parameters.

Question 2

What are the two types of parameters?

Answer 2

Start with a dash ( - a, - c or -ac) called options know as switches and arguments that have no leading dashes usually the name of the file/s the command will process.

Question 3

what the two types of options?

Answer 3

short dash options ex: -a ,-c or -ac (they can be put together) or long dash options which use two dashes and can not be put together –

Question 4

What is the general command structure?

Answer 4

Command ( what you want it to do) > Option ( How to do it) > Argument ( What to do with it)

Question 5

What is the benefit of computing?

Answer 5

To simplify repetitive and huge tasks.

Question 6

Shell allows us automate tasks by using shell scripts

Answer 6

true

Question 7

What is a shell script?

Answer 7

A file containing a series of commands.

Question 8

What is a variable?

Answer 8

Areas of memory that can be used to store information and are referred to by a name.

Question 9

The benefits of a variable are?

Answer 9

Machine code more readable to users, a placeholder for unknown values, can be a value or a command, user doesn’t know value before they execute the program and it will be resolved at execution time.

Question 10

Should you put spaces in variables?

Answer 10

no

Question 11

What are the rules for naming variables?

Answer 11

Must start with a letter, a name not contain embedded spaces, no punctuation marks allowed.

Question 12

How to you print all the environment variables?

Answer 12

printenv

Question 13

What does an all uppercase variable indicate?

Answer 13

It is an environment variable.

Question 14

What are meta characters?

Answer 14

characters that are treated differently by the command line ( or are special)

Question 15

What does the shell use to identify the arguments for a command?

Answer 15

blanks/space are interpreted by the shell as how to separate arguments. More than one blank is still treated as one blank.

Question 16

What are some examples of meta characters ?

Answer 16

dollar sign $, star *, semi-colon ; , greater than >, question mark ?, ampersand & and the pipe |

Question 17

What is Quoting?

Answer 17

The act of protecting shell meta-characters from being treated specially by the shell.

Question 18

What does Quoting do?

Answer 18

It prevents the shell from acting on and expanding the meta-characters.

Question 19

What is the syntax for quoting?

Answer 19

” “ , ‘ ‘ , or \

Question 20

What does ~ on the command prompt mean?

Answer 20

Home Directory

Question 21

What does cd stand for?

Answer 21

Change Directory

Question 22

What does pwd mean?

Answer 22

Present working directory

Question 23

What does touch mean?

Answer 23

It creates an empty file with whatever you put in it.

Question 24

What does ls -la do?

Answer 24

List but with additional details such as permissions, who owns it, file size and when it was created.

Question 25

What does the option -la mean?

Answer 25

long view attributes

Question 26

old pwd is a env variable that ..

Answer 26

stores the last directory you were in.

Question 27

What is the special meaning of the ; meta character?

Answer 27

It is used to separate two characters.

Question 28

What are Manuel Pages?

Answer 28

A set of pages explaining every command available on the system.

Question 29

How do you keyword search on manual pages?

Answer 29

man -k ls

Question 30

If you want to search a specifc keyword in a man page

Answer 30

foreward slash then search term /<searchterm></searchterm>

Question 31

What is the difference between ls -a and ls–all ?

Answer 31

one is shorthand and one is longhand

Question 32

What are the advantages of using shorthand options?

Answer 32

Short hand allows for multiple options to be chained together and are quicker to type out.

Question 33

What are info pages?

Answer 33

more detailed than man pages; divided into different nodes or pages and works like a web browser

Question 34

How to do you navigate the info pages?

Answer 34

p- previous and n -next and q- back to command line.