These are not hacking commands; they're not penetration testing commands. They're just commands used in Linux that allow us to do different things on the operating system.

This overview of how the Terminal works was just designed to get you more comfortable with the structures, navigating the directories, and so on.

Now, let's take an overview of the Linux Terminal. The Terminal is a place where you can do anything you want on the operating system, run any program by executing commands associated with the program we want. The Linux Terminal is very powerful; it basically allows us to do a lot more than the graphical interface. A lot of the programs that we're going to use have graphical interfaces, but the command line is much easier and quicker. Also, in many scenarios, you will get a Secure Socket Shell (SSH) or Command Prompt on the target computer, and you will need to know the commands in order to do what you wish on the computer, or to pen test its security.

Learning how to deal with the Command Prompt is very important. We're going to use it a lot in the upcoming chapters, but for now, we will provide a very simple overview. It's much easier than running through the graphical interfaces. Using it is very simple; you literally type in the command, and the result is displayed on the screen as text.