Intimidating to be the first to post here, but I'm sure I'll get something wrong, and there's nothing like correcting someone for activity eh? 😆

So for a first off-the-cuff post, I thought I would just explain some file locations you'll see a lot learning linux, and mention a few tools. Feel free to add more of both in the comments!

Locations: / The most important location on any Linux machine, not to be confused with root's home directory, this is the starting point of the Kernel's access to any file, and in Linux everything is a file. This isn't a hard drive itself, but often points to the base of a hard drive. During bootup, one of the key steps is mounting the / filesystem. Essentially the operating system needs to establish a common logical tree to find things, and this is the base of that tree. I'm sure there is some exceptions I can't think of, but everything actively being used by your system will be under here somewhere.

. .. Related so I'll tackle these together. The . and .. directories will be found as children of every folder on your system, and point to places relative to your current one. The . directory is the equivalent of your current directory. .. points to the directory that contains the one you are in. Also . has a special meaning as the first character of a file name. It indicates in that case the file should be hidden to programs that respect that.

/home This is a very common, but not universal folder under root. It is semi-equivalent to the Users directory in windows. Most users will have a folder under here to store their files. /home/root/ is the typically inaccessible to non-privileged user home for the root user for instance. As a bonus ~/ will point to your own home folder on most systems.

/bin Home of the binaries. /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin are where most local applications will be installed. Don't remember the exact distinction between /bin and /sbin but sbin seems to contain more system utilities.

/usr is a directory for holding user files. Not the same as home, but I think in the sense that they are distinct from system files and libraries

/lib where most libraries go. /usr/lib is also around for this. You likely won't spend much time here.

/etc the place for all your system configurations. This contains mostly text files that are read by various programs for default settings. Only edit here if you want a change for all users. Usually for one user programs will read a file in /home/user/.config or a similarly unique to them locale.

/boot Not always around, but as you can imagine it holds important files for starting the system. In most Linux distros the file that contains the Kernel is in here, along with some other tools to help get you to a full machine. Don't mess around in here until you're ready to dig in.

/sys /proc These directories are used to store and display information usually used by the kernel. Both very powerful and very dangerous. Writing into the wrong file here can change electrical settings for devices, and it is easy to get lost in the looping/nested structure

/dev This is where your devices are kept. When you need to tell a program where a peripheral, a disk, or an internal resource can be accessed this is the folder for it

Tools:

Running out of steam so I'll keep it short

-x If I use this I mean a flag passed to the command. So cp is the copy command. If I want it to work recursively and copy subdirectories I need to give it the r flag. So the command becomes cp -r

ls LiSt files. Basically just prints out the contents of a directory. -a tells it to list everything even hidden files

cp for CoPy

cd is Change Directory

du lists Disk Usage You can use -d to ask it to summarize things up to a Depth and -h to ask it to print sizes in a way that is human readable

df lists Disk Free

sudo is used to run a command as root. This one comes from su the program it mostly replaces, which itself is I believe for Super User. So sudo is really Super User Do.

Lastly some flags are respected by many different programs. Not all, but many. So -h for help, -v for extra logs, and -V for version for instance are very common

That should be enough to get things started. Please chime in with essentials I missed, mistakes I committed, or tricks with any of the commands.