Often referred to as the shell, terminal, console, prompt or various other names, the Linux command line is a text interface to a computer.
Linux has several built-in commands accessible in the shell directly. Refer to this link for a list of the basic commands.
Binaries/executables from packages installed using package managers such as yum or apt can be accessed readily in the shell. Packages from source compilation however, often needs extra steps like appending the full installation path to the PATH environment variable.
Some commands are only accessible via Environment Modules and Conda.
This package for managing environment variables is often installed on the compute servers to be able to load libraries for compiling/running numerical models such as WRF and RegCM4.
To see available modules:
module avail
To use a module:
module load <module name>
To remove a certain module from the current environment:
module unload <module name>
To remove all loaded modules:
module purge
Another environment management tool usually used to load python environment. Read the documentation here.
In the lab, a preconfigured conda environment called toolbox is used.
Note: First time users might need to initialize the environment using:
conda init bash
The conda environments will be available after relogging in.
To use the environment:
conda activate toolbox
To unload the environment:
conda deactivate