# From a curious newbie to a comfortable command line user. The journey so far at Blockfuse labs.
Just a few days ago, we had zero knowledge of what the command line was. In fact, it was a strange term for us when our instructors talked about it. Fast forward today, I am comfortable using and learning more about the CLI.
Before this week, I was used to only the graphical user interface(GUI), dragging files around and clicking my life away. But everything changed when our instructors introduced us to the command line prompt that was the game changer. It felt intimidating at first but with the great teachings of our instructors everything fell in places for us to understand and command.
The first thing we learnt was the pwd command with stands for print working directory. Using this command I was able to understand the directories I was working on to further improve my understanding. We went on to learn the cd command which stands for change directory and it's used to change our directories.
Note: Directories = folders
We learnt the touch command which is used to create a file and the "mkdir" command which is use to make directories. With this avaliable knowledge we did a class test to further increase our understanding of the acquired knowledge. From just this commands learnt, I immediately know why our instrutors said that the CLI is more powerful than the GUI. I can create a ton of files or directories at once and faster than the GUI.
The real moment came when I created my first Bash script. Bash (“Bourne Again Shell”) is a scripting language that allows us to automate tasks in the terminal.
I used this command to automate the terminal to create files and echo some text into the file and print the output of the text to the command line.
Honourable mention of other commands learnt are "cat", "echo", "chmod", "chown", "sudo" etc.
Key Lessons I Learned
The command line is powerful but not as scary as it seems.
Every small command builds your confidence.
Bash scripting opens the door to easy task and efficiency.
Mistakes are part of learning, don't fear the errors!.
Now that I’ve written my first script, I’m excited to go deeper. I want to learn how to:
Use conditionals and loops in scripts
Handle user input
Automate repetitive tasks on my computer
The journey has just begun, but this first week in the command line has changed how I see computers forever.