Skip to content

Day 1 Wrap-up

Great work. You now have the core command-line foundation needed for Day 2 automation.

1. Day 1 Review

Today you learned how to:

  • Navigate the filesystem with absolute and relative paths (pwd, cd, ls)
  • Create, move, copy, and remove files/folders (mkdir, touch, mv, cp, rm)
  • Edit and inspect text files (nano, cat, less)
  • Search and summarize text content (grep, wc)
  • Work with compressed files and downloaded datasets (wget, zcat, zless, gunzip)
  • Understand key environment variables ($HOME, $USER, $PATH)

2. Day 1 Readiness Check

Before starting Day 2, make sure you can complete each task below without looking up every command:

  • Create a folder named practice, enter it, and print the full path.
  • Create a file with two lines of text, then copy it to a second file.
  • Count the number of lines in the copied file.
  • Search one keyword in the file and print matching lines.
  • Download a .gz file and inspect it without fully uncompressing it.

If any item above feels unclear, review the matching Day 1 lesson section before moving on.

3. Command Reference (Day 1)

Command Purpose Example
pwd Print current directory pwd
ls -alh List files with details ls -alh
cd Change directory cd training
mkdir Create directory mkdir data
touch Create empty file touch test.txt
mv Move/rename file mv test.txt data.txt
cp Copy file cp data.txt second.txt
rm -rf Remove file/directory rm -rf extra/
cat Print file contents cat data.txt
grep Search text patterns grep "Unix" third.txt
wc -l Count lines wc -l data.txt
wget Download file wget URL
zless View compressed file zless file.gz

If you forget a command, use:

man <command>

Example:

man cp

4. Looking Ahead to Day 2

Day 2 focuses on scaling up these exact skills:

  • Processing many files at once (find, xargs, parallel)
  • Extracting structured data from large files (grep, sed, awk)
  • Automating repeated tasks with scripts
  • Running larger workloads on remote systems and schedulers

The command fundamentals from Day 1 are the building blocks for reproducible pipelines.

Day 1 Cheat Sheet