Lion Cipher Lab

Your first Linux terminal: the commands you'll actually use

• Foundations
• Beginner
• ~40 min
• Free · no account required

Why it matters

Every security job — SOC analyst, pentester, cloud engineer, incident responder — quietly assumes you can move around a Linux terminal on day one. Most tools, most servers, and most hands-on labs live behind a text prompt with no buttons to click. Learn these ten-or-so commands once and the black screen stops being scary and starts being the fastest way you work.

What you'll learn

• Linux command line
• shell navigation
• file management
• grep basics
• reading file permissions

Steps in this lab

1. Open the terminal and breathe — what you're looking at
2. Where am I, and what's here? (pwd, ls, cd)
3. Build a workspace, then write and read a file (mkdir, touch, echo, cat, less)
4. Copy, rename, move — and the one command to respect (cp, mv, rm)
5. Find things fast (find, grep)
6. Get unstuck yourself, and read permissions (man, --help, ls -l, chmod)
7. You can navigate a Linux box now — here's what that unlocks

Open the full interactive lab →