When I first started learning Linux, I thought it was just another operating system. Then I tried using the terminal for real tasks and everything felt foreign — commands didn’t behave the way I expected, permissions locked me out, and I kept wondering why a small typo could break an entire workflow. What changed that confusion into clarity was working through real, hands-on examples: navigating the filesystem, managing users, understanding permissions, and watching how processes actually run.

Let's see... where do I begin? Since this is my first blog post of the course. I don't want to set the precedence that each day is going to be some deeply insightful blogpost. Instead, I'm going to treat it as a daily checkin of something cool I learned. 

Most of Monday, April 7th was spent reviewing command line basics and HTML/CSS. So, the coolest thing I learned was actually from Dave the night before about searching for a specific letter of a file name from the command line. 

So... maybe there is an instance where you need to find a folder or filename that starts with a certain letter. Maybe you can't remember the name or there is just a ton of info in the directory and you don't want to have to sift through it all. 

In my case, I was looking for a file that started with the letter "s"

In the command line, go into the directory that you want to search and type in: 

ls |grep -ie '^s' --color

ls: list

|grep: searches for a specified string

-ie: removes case sensitivity, I believe it stands for 'insensitive expression'

'^s': the carrot (^) means "starts with the letter 's'." Obviously this could be swapped out with any letter or phrase 'Sc' maybe... but the phrase or letter do not need to be case sensitive.

--color:  changes the color of the letter 's" that shows up in the result.