Beginner · 8 min read · Updated 2026-11

Your first steps in the Linux terminal

Open a terminal, find out where you are, and run your first real commands — with the exact output from a live Ubuntu system.

The terminal is a text window where you type a command and the computer does exactly what you asked. It looks intimidating at first, but it is just a conversation: you type a line, press Enter, and read the answer. Everything below was run on a real Ubuntu 24.04 machine — the output you see is the real thing, not a drawing.

Ubuntu terminal showing whoami, pwd, ls and uptime commands
A real terminal on Ubuntu 24.04 — this is what you'll be typing into.

Who am I, and where am I?

Two commands answer the first questions every beginner has. whoami prints your username, and pwd (print working directory) shows the folder you are standing in right now.

bash — real output
$ whoami
root
$ pwd
/tmp
You are the user “root”, standing in the /tmp folder.
The $ at the start of the line is the prompt — the terminal waiting for you. You don't type it; you type what comes after it.

What is this machine?

uname -a describes the system itself: the kernel name, the version, and the processor type. It's the first thing a technician runs on an unfamiliar machine.

bash — real output
$ uname -a
Linux vm 6.18.44 #1 SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ cat /etc/os-release | head -1
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS"
A 64-bit Linux machine running Ubuntu 24.04.

Is the machine healthy?

Three quick commands tell you how a server is doing: uptime (how long it has been running), df -h (disk space), and free -h (memory). As an IT technician these are the first things you check when someone says “it's slow”.

bash — real output
$ uptime -p
up 13 minutes
$ df -h /
/dev/vda  252G  8.8G  30G  23% /
$ free -h
        total   used   free
Mem:     15Gi  553Mi   15Gi
Up 13 minutes, disk 23% full, plenty of free memory.

What to remember

  • whoami — your username
  • pwd — the folder you are in
  • uname -a — the system and kernel
  • uptime, df -h, free -h — the machine's health
Nothing here changes anything on the computer — these commands only look and report. They are completely safe to run.
All articles