Terminal

The terminal is the black thing with text you probably have already seen in some hacker movies. It might look scary, but it basically works like a voice assistant with text input.

If you see instructions in the form of sudo pacman -Q | grep -i -C 10 "apt", then this is something you have to copy and paste into the terminal.

How does the terminal work?

You write a line of text, you press enter, and you look at what happens. The terminal usually tells you if something goes wrong. Sometimes you need to press additional buttons like y for "yes" or n for "no".

Is the terminal dangerous?

It might look scary, but it's not dangerous. If you write something wrong, it will just tell you that it's wrong - your computer will not explode.

So should you just input whatever you find at some random place in the internet?

NO! You should not copy/paste stuff from untrusted sources (like this wiki - everyone can edit it) if you don't understand what you're doing. The commands might be malicious. For example, if you would type the following, you would delete everything on your computer, and potentially destroy your motherboard.

DO NOT DO THIS! sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-rootDO NOT DO THIS!

Other commands may uninstall your graphical user interface, or install a remote access for hackers.

However, it's not easy to input these commands by accident. You might type sudo rm -rf / by accident, but you won't type the --no-preserve-root if you don't actually want to harm your computer. You should be careful when running sudo though. This is the equivalent to "Administrator access", but much more powerful. You should always avoid running a root-shell (a shell where you have sudo access without typing sudo). You would detect it by the # symbol at the beginning of each line.

There might be instances where you copy a command from some website, and you also copy the "enter command". This might lead to enter being automatically pressed at the end of the line, and the command being executed without additional interaction by you. If you want to modify the command before executing it, this would be unintended behavior. To prevent it, you can copy to a text editor first, modify the commands, and then copy to the terminal.