L in u X ba sics for h acke rs g e t t I n g s t a r t e d w I t h

4
Chapter 1
The Terminal
The first step in using Kali is to open the terminal, which is the command 
line interface we’ll use in this book. In Kali Linux, you’ll find the icon 
for the terminal along the left of the desktop. Click this icon to open the 
terminal. Your new terminal should look like the one shown in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3: The Kali terminal
This terminal opens the command line environment, known as the shell, 
which enables you to run commands on the underlying operating systems 
and write scripts. Although Linux has many different shell environments, 
the most popular is the bash shell, which is also the default shell in Kali and 
many other Linux distributions.
To change your password, you can use the command 
passwd
. 
The Linux Filesystem
The Linux filesystem structure is somewhat different from that of Windows. 
Linux doesn’t have a physical drive (such as the C: drive) at the base of the 
file system but uses a logical filesystem instead. At the very top of the file-
system structure is /, which is often referred to as the root of the filesystem, 
as if it were an upside-down tree (see Figure 1-4). Keep in mind that this is 
different from the root user. These terms may seem confusing at first, but 
they will become easier to differentiate once you get used to Linux.

Getting Started with the Basics
5
/
/root
Superuser’s
home
directory
/boot
Kernel
image
/home
User
directories
/etc
System 
configuration
files
/mnt
General-
purpose
mount point
/proc
View of 
internal 
kernel data
/dev
Special
device files
/sys
Kernel’s 
view of the 
hardware
/bin
Binaries
/sbin
Binaries
/lib
Libraries
/usr
/bin
More
binaries
/sbin
More
binaries
/lib
More
libraries
Figure 1-4: The Linux filesystem
The root (/) of the filesystem is at the top of the tree, and the following 
are the most important subdirectories to know:

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