Putting it all together

You’ve learned eight commands across the last nine lessons. They are, in order:

That’s the whole Level 1 toolkit. Now we use it all in one sitting. Open your terminal and follow along — every command. No watching, no skimming. You’ll feel the muscle memory click into place by the end.

The mission

Build the folder for your own personal website — my-site. It’s the project the rest of the course works on, so you’re not scaffolding a throwaway: you’re laying the first stones of the thing you’ll keep growing. The end state will look like this:

my-site/
├── README.md
├── pages/
│   ├── index.html
│   └── about.html
├── styles/
│   └── main.css
├── server/
│   └── placeholder.txt
└── archive/
    └── old-readme.md

A couple of HTML pages, a stylesheet, and a server/ folder for the tiny backend you’ll meet later. You’ll build this from nothing using only the commands you already know. Then you’ll reorganize it, copy parts of it, and clean some of it up.

Step 1 — start fresh

Go home, make a workspace, and step inside:

cd ~
mkdir terminal-practice
cd terminal-practice
pwd

The pwd should show your terminal-practice folder. If anything looks wrong, just cd ~ and start over — you can’t get lost.

Step 2 — scaffold the project tree in one shot

Remember mkdir -p? It can build the whole tree for you:

mkdir -p my-site/pages
mkdir -p my-site/styles
mkdir -p my-site/server
mkdir -p my-site/archive

Step inside and check:

cd my-site
ls

You should see four folders: archive, pages, server, styles. (The pages folder will hold your HTML — ls pages to confirm it’s empty for now.)

Step 3 — create the files

touch README.md
touch pages/index.html pages/about.html
touch styles/main.css
touch server/placeholder.txt

Five new empty files in one screenful. Run ls and ls pages to check.

Step 4 — put real content in the README

echo "# My Site" > README.md
echo "" >> README.md
echo "My personal website — plain HTML and CSS." >> README.md

Notice the single > on the first line (creates/overwrites) and double >> on the others (append). Confirm:

cat README.md

You should see three lines.

Step 5 — make a backup before changing anything

Good habit: copy the README before editing it heavily.

cp README.md archive/old-readme.md
ls archive

old-readme.md is there. The original README.md is untouched.

Step 6 — change your mind, rename a folder

You decide styles/ should really be called css/:

mv styles css
ls

styles is gone; css is there. The file inside (main.css) came along for the ride.

Step 7 — clean up

The archive/ folder turned out to be unnecessary. Delete it. Since it has a file inside, plain rm archive won’t work — you need -r:

ls archive
rm -r archive
ls

Notice the ls archive before — that’s the “look before you delete” habit. The ls after confirms the folder is gone.

Step 8 — admire your work

cd ~/terminal-practice/my-site
ls -la

You scaffolded a real-looking project folder from absolutely nothing, using only commands you’ve learned in the last 30 minutes.

Bonus: nuke the whole thing

When you’re done, leave no trace:

cd ~
rm -r terminal-practice

Gone — practice workspace and all. That’s the point: you built my-site from typing, so you can rebuild it any time. Files made by hand cost the same as files made by clicking, except now you have a recipe to do it again in five seconds. (Don’t worry — in Level 2 you’ll open a ready-made my-site and meet the tool that builds the rest of it with you.)

What just happened

You used:

• pwd, ls — to know where you were and what was around.
• cd, mkdir -p — to build and navigate the structure.
• touch, echo >, echo >> — to create and write to files.
• cp, mv, rm -r — to copy, reorganize, and clean up.

That is the entire daily toolkit of every developer on Earth. Everything else — pipes, grep, git, ssh, package managers — sits on top of these few moves. You’ve got the foundation.

Where to next

Level 2 picks up where this leaves off: you can make files, but you haven’t really read them yet (besides one cat in this lesson). Next up:

• cat, head, tail, less — read files of any size.
• grep — search inside files for a word.
• find — search the filesystem for a file by name.

Reading and searching is the half of the terminal where it stops feeling like “typing instead of clicking” and starts feeling like a superpower.

When you’re ready: take a break, then start Level 2.

Try a smaller version here

The practice terminal below is a tiny sandbox. Try pwd and ls to confirm you’ve got the muscle memory. Earn your final XP and call Level 1 done.