How to Execute a Terminal Command on Linux Mint

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In this tutorial, we'll learn how to execute a single terminal command on Linux Mint. This will be an introduction to how to use the terminal for people new to Linux.
A window titled virtual@cucriosities:~. Its main pane has a dark background and contains one line of text. It reads: in green text, virtual@curiosities, then a white colon (:), followed by a blue tilde (~), and a dollar white dollar sign ($). A space and then a flashing rectangle. The word "date" is typed. Afterwards the current date is appears under the first line. The multi-colored code that was in the first line appears again at the bottom with the flashing rectangle to its right.
The command date being executed in the GNOME Terminal on Linux Mint.

Before anything else, open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T.

To execute a command on the terminal, follow the following steps:

1: click on the main pane of the terminal window to give it keyboard focus. You should see a white rectangle flashing in front of the shell prompt (the shell prompt on Mint looks like user@host:~$ ). This rectangle is the text cursor indicating that you can type a new command in the command line.

2: type the following command:

date

3: press the Enter key. This will execute the command.

You should see some text appear on the terminal. This is the output of the command you typed. In the case of the date command, the output is a date that includes the weekday, month day, year, time, time zone, etc. Different commands have different outputs.

In a line under the output, you should see the shell prompt. The shell prompt serves the purpose of indicating that a command has finished. While a command is running, we can't type new commands in the terminal, so the shell prompt also indicates whether or not we can type a new command.

The command nvidia-smi being run in the terminal. Some information displayed includes: Driver Version: 550.90.07. CUDA Version: 12.4. GPU name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. Fan: 0%. Temperature: 53C. Power Usage/Capcity: N/A / 72W. Memory-Usage: 183MiB / 4096MiB. GPU Utilization: 1%. A list of processes, their PIDs, names, and GPU memory (VRAM) usage: /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 92MiB, cinnamon 86MiB.
The output of nvidia-smi (Nvidia's System Manager Interface command line utility) in a terminal.
Written by Noel Santos.

About the Author

I'm a self-taught Brazilian programmer graduated in IT from a FATEC. In a world of increasingly complex and essential computers, I decided to use my technical expertise in hardware, desktop applications, and web technologies to create an informative resource to make PC's easier to understand.

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