Page 43 - Raspberry Pi as a Foundation for Boosting Computer and Technology Literacy

Overview of shell commands 3.3

Table 3.4 Frequently used commands related to connectivity and networks
Command Description
ping ip/domain Check connectivity to a specific server
ifconfig Check active network interfaces
ssh username@host Connect to a remote shell
Getting help and manuals
Obviously, it is impossible for this monograph to cover all existing
shell commands, let alone their associated flags. There are simply too
many, and even more can be downloaded and installed from the soft-
ware repository via apt. Therefore, we highly encourage the reader to
do their own research and explore more specialized and advanced re-
sources on Linux systems, and on shells in particular. There is so much
more to learn.
Conveniently, a decent place to start is the terminal itself. Almost
all shell commands support a --help flag, which provides concise in-
formation about what a certain command does and its functionality
(Figure 3.17).
Alternatively, there is a specialized man command that accepts var-
ious other commands as arguments and returns an entire manual,
explaining everything one needs to know about a command in great
detail. These manuals are denoted by the jargon ‘man pages’.
For instance, the following command will open a man page for the
mv command (Figure 3.18):

man mv

Figure 3.17 Example of help flag usage

43