1. Go to a beach (preferably not one that makes you old);
  2. Look for something that looks like this:
  3. The command is ssh.

loggin in

Open the Terminal

You need to open a terminal window to log into the shell. The way you do that is different depending on what your computer is running:

Windows 11

Open "Terminal"

Windows 10

Open "Windows PowerShell"

MacOS

Open "Terminal"

Linux

It might be called "Terminal", "Console" or "Konsole" depending on what distribution you're using.

Log In

When you open the terminal, you should see a place where you can type words and such. This is called the "prompt".

Ok so you're gonna want to type in ssh <your username>@pronounmail.com (where <your username> is replaced with your actual username) and press enter (or return).

At this point it should ask you for your password. Type it in (keeping in mind that it won't actually show the letters you're typing it for securitie) and hit enter once more.

Ok at this point you should have reached pronounmail.com's shell and you've done it good job i love you dearly

how 2 use da shell

At this point you should be connected to pronounmail.com's shell, so you can now run wacky commands on the server!!

You can think of the shell as a really fucked up Start Menu. You can type the name of a program at the prompt and press enter, and the shell will attempt to locate and run it. Everything you type after the name of the program is an "argument", which you can use to tell the program what you want it to do. Take this command for example:

mkdir my_folder

This uses mkdir (short for "Make Directory" ("directory" is another word for "folder")) to create a folder called my_folder. In this example, mkdir is the name of the program and my_folder is the single argument.

most people call the first bit the command and also call the whole command a command. good for them :)

assorted tips

Lots of good information at https://fishshell.com/docs/current/

  • Press Ctrl+C to tell the currently running command to stop.
  • Use Ctrl+W to delete the previous word
  • To copy and paste things, use Ctrl+Shift+C/V (or Cmd+C/V on a mac).
  • Press Tab to try and autocomplete a thing, keep pressing Tab for more autocompletions.
  • Type the name of a command and press Alt+H to see helpful information about it
  • Press the up or down arrow keys to go through your command history

list of common commands

name of thing what it does example usage
touch Creates a file with no content touch my_file.txt
rm Deletes a file rm secrets.txt
cp Create a copy of a file cp a.txt b.txt
mv Move a file to a new location mv a.txt b.txt
mkdir Create a new directory (folder) mkdir wacky_folder
clear Clear the screen clear
ls List files in the current directory ls
cd Move into a directory cd wacky_folder