Stage 1 · Lesson 5 of 8

Getting help from the terminal

Almost every command comes with its own instructions. man ls opens the for ls. Inside it, press / to search and q to quit.

ls --help prints a short summary instead. If you install the tldr client, tldr ls shows a few practical examples. Found a long command online?

The website explainshell.com breaks it into parts and explains each one. Learning to look things up is the skill that makes the rest of this roadmap possible.

Common traprunning commands from AI answers or forums you do not understand; look them up first, especially anything with sudo, rm or a into a shell.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it

Resources for this stage

Start with

CourseFree
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
MIT · Beginner
The first lecture introduces the shell with exercises that work in the macOS terminal

Keep handy

Homebrew
The install command and documentation for the package manager you will use for every tool
Visual Studio Code
The editor used through this roadmap, with official set-up guides for each operating system

Also worth your time

roadmap.sh: LinuxGo deeper
A map of the whole Linux topic, to see how much there is beyond this stage