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3 - A Taste of the Command Line

If you've worked in DOS, you'll find Unix and its ilk familiar. But even if you've worked solely in Windows, it's to your benefit to get familiar with using the command line. Although Cygin/Linux provides a rich set of commands, from experience I've needed only a handful of them in developing ebm software. Start with these and then learn the others as you need them:

cd - Change directory - similar to Windows, although the directory layout is different. For instance, after installing the SDK, you'll have a root directory of franklin, and likely your projects below that. In that case, you'd move to your project's working directory by typing:

 cd /franklin/myproject

The initial slash indicates the root, so you are in effect moving to the root and then two directories down. Two important points for the non-Linux-ly inclined: slashes are reversed from Windows/DOS, and letter case is extremely important. Often, the reason you get a 'not found' error can be traced to an uppercase name when lowercase was expected, or vice versa. Because this error is so annoying to track down, I make it a practice to create all my files in lowercase.

man - This displays the manual pages for a command, if available. For instance,

 man grep

will give you documentation about grep. The page down key moves down, and the 'Q' key quits - remember this key, as I can say from experience that getting stuck in the man pages is extremely frustrating!

exit - Closes the Cygwin window.

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