Typographical Conventions

In what follows, we shall use the following typographical conventions:

Characters written in bold typewriter font indicate commands that may be typed and entered at the command line.
Characters written in italic typewriter font indicate non-specific filenames, directory names, or other arbitrary names.
Characters inserted within square brackets indicate individual physical keys to be pressed. For example, [Ctrl] indicates the "Control" key.
Text in blue indicates the output of a command or the contents of a file

So, for example,

$ ls somedirectory [Enter]

Means "at the bash prompt ($), type ls followed by the name of some directory, then press the key marked Enter."
Don't forget to press the [Enter] key as commands are not sent to the computer until this is done.

Important: Linux and bash are case-sensitve, so LS is not the same as ls. The same applies to filenames, so myfile.txt, MyFile.txt, and MYFILE.TXT are three seperate files. Be mindful of this when copying files to a PC, since DOS and Windows do not make this distinction.