Intro to Linux
Never opened a terminal before? Fear not! You'll learn to get around Linux with cd, ls, cat, chmod, grep and friends, on a real Ubuntu machine that runs right in your browser.
What you’ll learn
This course is 4 units and 34 lessons long. Every lesson is hands-on, and there is nothing to pay.
Unit 1 · What is Linux?
Where Linux came from, what a kernel actually does all day, why there are a hundred different versions of it, and how the filesystem is laid out. No commands to memorize yet; this one is about having a picture in your head before you start typing.
Unit 2 · Basic Commands
The commands you'll reach for every single day. Getting around, reading files, making and deleting them, working out who owns what and who's allowed to read it, editing in nano, and finding a needle in fourteen files with grep. Almost every lesson drops you at a terminal or a flag.
Unit 3 · Linux^2
Once you've got the basics down, it's time to get fancy. Saving and piping output, counting and sorting through giant log files, hunting down lost files, borrowing root's powers with sudo, killing frozen programs, opening tarballs, and a first peek at networking.
Unit 4 · sudo graduate
The final exam, kind of. One challenge that needs pretty much every command from this course, and then you're done!
Course outline
Introduction to Linux: 4 units, 34 lessons. Every student gets their own Ubuntu container, in the browser. Fifteen lessons have a live terminal in them, and nine are gated on a capture-the-flag challenge whose flag is only readable once the task has actually been done on the machine. Unit 1: What is Linux? What a kernel does between the hardware and the programs, where Linux came from, what the major distributions are each good for, how the filesystem is laid out under /, and the difference between an absolute and a relative path (plus the ~, . and .. shortcuts). Unit 2: Basic Commands Working in a terminal: case sensitivity, arguments, command history. Reading a command's own docs with --help and man. Looking around with cat, ls and pwd. Moving with cd. Creating and deleting with touch, mkdir and rm. Copying and relocating with cp and mv. Users, groups, and the owner and group stamped on every file. Reading permissions out of ls -l and changing them with chmod and chown. Editing files in nano. Searching file contents with grep, including recursively through a whole directory tree. Unit 3: Linux^2 Redirecting output with >, >> and 2>, and chaining commands with pipes. Counting with wc, sorting and deduplicating with sort and uniq, and tracking down files with find. Running commands as root with sudo, stopping processes with ps and kill, unpacking archives with tar and zip, history and keyboard shortcuts, and a first look at networking with ping and curl. Unit 4: sudo graduate One final challenge that pulls from the whole course. Assessment: multiple-choice questions throughout, plus nine capture-the-flag challenges (cat, ls, cd, grep, find, sudo, kill, tar, and the final) checked by the platform.
Ready to start Intro to Linux?
CyberAcad is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Creating an account takes under a minute and costs nothing. Teachers and club leaders can request a class code to track a whole group.