UNIX was developed long before Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), so it was designed to work from a keyboard. There are now UNIX GUI tools that let you click with a mouse, but these do not give you the complete functionality of the command line, and they are not available if the GUI is not working. You really ought to learn some UNIX.
John Barrymore, when asked why he needed cue cards in a movie studio when he possessed perfect recall elsewhere, replied...
"My memory is full of beauty: Hamlet's soliloquies, Queen Mab's speech, the Song of Solomon. Do you expect me to clutter up all of that with this horse shit?"
There is no need to memorize the stuff in this article unless you plan to become a UNIX administrator. This document is structured as a task-by-task reference. You should read through the section on UNIX, which explains pathnames and the command structure. You probably should read the section on accessing the UNIX shell. After that, you can look up your task in the table of contents, and just read that section.
All of the commands described here are rigorously documented by help files, as described below under Getting Help. The descriptions in this article are simplified to assist beginners, so lots of information has been left out. If you are doing something weird or difficult, or you just want more information, you should read the documentation.
This document is copyright (C) 1999 and 2000, by Howard Gibson. You may copy this document onto bulletin boards, web pages and other computer media, as long as the file is unaltered, and the distribution is not-for-profit. All other rights are reserved.