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DAY 01 of 12

Kickoff & your tools

Meet the OS remote control — and how to drive it from anywhere

You can do… by end of day
  • Narrate the full journey from “type URL” to “page renders.”
  • Navigate, create, edit, move and delete files in the terminal.
  • Read and change file permissions.
  • Find, inspect and kill a running process.
  • Edit a file with nano — and not panic in vim.
  • SSH into a machine using a key, and move files with scp/rsync.
Deliverable

A one-page personal terminal cheat sheet (your own words) + a hand-drawn Big Picture diagram.

Big-picture hook

Everything in the next eleven days is just one box in this diagram getting filled in. Today you met all the nouns.

Concepts what you'll understand
  • The request journey (DNS → TCP → TLS → HTTP → app → DB) — the Big Picture diagram, annotated live and redrawn by you.
  • The shell: a place you type commands, each one a small program.
  • Filesystem navigation & file ops: pwd, ls, cd, mkdir, cp, mv, rm, cat, head, tail, find, grep.
  • Permissions: what rwx and drwxr-xr-x mean; chmod, chown.
  • Processes: ps aux, PIDs, kill, and the idea of a daemon.
  • Network tools you'll use constantly: curl (make web requests from the terminal), ping, dig/nslookup, ip a, ss -tlnp.
  • Editing in the terminal: nano (primary) + enough vim (modes, :wq) to survive.
  • SSH: secure shell, why keys beat passwords, ssh user@host, scp/rsync for moving files.
The lab hands-on, ends with something live
  1. Terminal scavenger hunt: build a directory tree, make/move files, chmod a file and run it, grep for a string, find a process with ps and kill it.
  2. Stare at your own machine: ip a, ss -tlnp, curl ifconfig.me, ping 1.1.1.1, dig google.com. Write down what each shows and means.
  3. Edit like a pro: create and edit a file in nano, then open it in vim, navigate and save without breaking it.
  4. First SSH: connect to a machine with a key, run a few commands, copy a file over with scp. Goal: kill the intimidation.
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