I'm pretty sure you use your phone to perform a number of activities, such as sending messages, shopping online and watching videos. You simply tap your screen, scroll and swipe. But have you ever thought of how your phone responds to your tapping, scrolling, and swiping? You interact with your phone and computer through a graphic user interface or GUI, which is just a layer above underlying commands that tells the device what to do. Developers, however, need to know how to use specific commands to perform various types of tasks. For example, to create a new folder on the desktop, you right-click and choose New Folder. In the command line, use the specific command mkdir to achieve the same result. Having a grip on UNIX commands specifically is a great skill to have in today's software development world. In this video, you will get started with a few basic Unix commands. Did you know that the majority of companies run their platforms on the Cloud, and 90 percent of these systems run on a platform called Linux? You might be wondering why I am discussing Linux, while the topic of this video is Unix commands. To answer this, let's explore some history. Unix preceded Linux and was developed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and team at AT&T Labs in 1969. Linux came much later on and was originally developed as a hobby by Linus Torvalds, hence the name Linux. The commands that you will explore in this video originated from the Unix platform, but you can use them in most modern environments that run some flavor of Linux. Using the command line could seem a little intimidating at first, but you will quickly learn that Unix commands are simply a layer below the normal actions, such as opening file directories or renaming files. Windows, for example, became the dominant desktop operating system, mainly due to it's easier to use GUI. Windows allowed non-technical users to perform tasks without having to learn a list of commands. But you, as an aspiring developer, will get to use Unix commands to develop those tasks. Before I delve into some of the most common commands, it's important to note that each command has a set of helper instructions. These helpers give detailed information about how the commands can be run and how something we call flags can be passed. One of these helpers is the man command. Man is short for manual, and when called against a command, it will display a detailed manual of instructions for that given command. You can also use the command man space ls, which will show the detailed manual of instructions for the list command ls. We can also use something called flags in conjunction with Unix commands. Flags are used to modify the behavior of a command. Think of them as options that can either change or extend the functionality of the given command. Next, you will learn about some of the most common to use Unix commands, and in the next video, you will see some of them in action. The cd or change directory command is used to move from different directories of the file system. You can learn more about working with relative and absolute paths from the additional reading at the end of this lesson. Ls is used to show the contents of the current working directory. The ls command can accept many different types of flags that will change what is returned in the response. For example, ls -l, lists the file out, in list order, and shows the read or write permissions, owners and groups it belongs to. Ls -a, on the other hand, will list all files and directories including hidden ones. The PWD or print working directory command shows the full path of the current working directory. The copy or cp command copies files or folders from one destination to another, and the MV, move command, moves files from one directory to another. In this video, you learned about some of the most commonly used Unix commands. Next time you use your device, think about the commands that run underneath the GUI to complete tasks and commands.
