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A Quick Introduction to the Linux Terminal

As explained earlier, you'll be working extensively with the Linux Terminal throughout this lab course. An idle WSL-ROS terminal instance will look like this:

Terminal Window

Here, the presence of the $ symbol indicates that the terminal is ready to accept a command. Text before the $ symbol has two parts separated by the : symbol:

  • Text to the left of the : tells us the name of the Linux user ("student" in this case) followed by the WSL-ROS version that you are working with.
  • Text to the right of the : tells us where in the Linux Filesystem we are currently located (~ means "The Home Directory", which is an alias for the path: /home/student/).

If you don't see the $ symbol at all, then this means that a process is currently running. To stop any running process enter Ctrl+C simultaneously on your keyboard.