Typographic conventions

If you see something that looks a bit like

• ls -l

(Notice the bullet & the grey background.)

It is likely a command line. You can triple-click it, then copy & paste it directly into a terminal.

If there is a part that's ALL-CAPS & BOLD, this is a part of the command line you'll probably need to edit for your particular usage.

i.e.:

• cp FOO.BAR FOO.BAR.bak

(Really... if you see anything in bold, think about it before just pasting.)

Sometimes, there'll be whole scripts to paste into a file on your machine. (I like vi as an editor, but use whatever editor you like.) When a script is posted, it'll be formatted like this:

 # This is a rather silly little bash script...
 
 echo "This script is silly."
 echo "It doesn't do much."
 echo
 echo "In fact, it just tells you it's silly..."

Just copy the whole thing & paste it into your editor in a terminal...

(Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do the BOLD & ALL-CAPS thing inside the scripts, but I'll try to make notes to help.)