Linux and the Command Line
Learn to work on a Linux server from the terminal: files, permissions, logs, services, scripts and SSH.
What you'll learn
- Move around a Linux server and find, read, copy and delete files safely
- Read and fix file permissions with chmod, chown and sudo
- Search and count log lines with pipes, grep, sort and awk
- Find and stop processes, and run your app as a systemd service
- Write bash scripts that stop on errors, and run them on a schedule with cron
- Log in to servers with SSH keys, copy files, and reach private hosts through a tunnel
Needs basic programming experience in any language, you have used a terminal before, even if only to paste commands
Earn a certificate
Finish all 44 lessons and get a certificate with your name on it.
- Verifiable link anyone can check
- One click to add to LinkedIn
- Download as PNG or print to PDF
Course content
About this course
This course is for backend developers who can write code but have mostly used the terminal by copying commands from a guide. You'll learn what those commands do, so you can work on a Linux server on your own and fix things when they break.
All 44 lessons use one example: an orders API written in Node.js, running on an Ubuntu 24.04 server. You log in to it, read its config and logs, fix its permissions, run it as a service, write scripts to back it up and deploy it, and reach it from your laptop over SSH. Each lesson is 2 to 4 minutes long, about two and a half hours in total.
The course has 7 chapters. You start with the terminal, the shell and moving around the file system. Then you work with files and folders, users and permissions, and text tools like pipes, grep, sed, awk, curl and jq. After that come processes, signals, systemd and ports, then bash scripts and cron. The last chapter covers SSH: keys, the config file, copying files and port forwarding.
Course by
Kamran Ahmed
Kamran is the founder of roadmap.sh. He has spent over a decade building products at startups and scale-ups, and created open-source tools used by millions of developers. He loves teaching and simplifying complex topics.
Published 5m ago
