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Your First Keystrokes
So let's get started. Launch the terminal emulator! Once it comes up, we should see some- thing like this:
[me@linuxbox ~]$
[me@linuxbox ~]$
This is called a shell prompt and it will appear whenever the shell is ready to accept in- put. While it may vary in appearance somewhat depending on the distribution, it will usu- ally include your username@machinename, followed by the current working directory (more about that in a little bit) and a dollar sign.
If the last character of the prompt is a pound sign (“#”) rather than a dollar sign, the ter- minal session has superuser privileges. This means either we are logged in as the root user or we selected a terminal emulator that provides superuser (administrative) privi-
Your First Keystrokes
leges.
Assuming that things are good so far, let's try some typing. Enter some gibberish at the prompt like so:
[me@linuxbox ~]$ kaekfjaeifj
[me@linuxbox ~]$ kaekfjaeifj
Since this command makes no sense, the shell will tell us so and give us another chance:
bash: kaekfjaeifj: command not found [me@linuxbox ~]$
bash: kaekfjaeifj: command not found [me@linuxbox ~]$