pwd prints where you are and cd moves you. Paths starting with / are absolute, others relative. ~ is home, .. the parent, and cd - returns to the previous directory, printing its name. ls -l shows type and permissions (decoded in Permission Bits), links, owner, group, size, time and name; add -a for dotfiles such as .htaccess and .env, -h for readable sizes, and -t to put the newest file first.
cp, mv and rm never ask: they overwrite and delete silently, and there is no trash can. Use -i while you learn, and copy a site with cp -a, which keeps modes, ownership, timestamps and symlinks.
mkdir -p /tmp/site/{public,logs} && cd /tmp/site
printf '<h1>Hello</h1>\n' > public/index.html
ls -lha public
cp -a public public.bak # preserve mode, owner and timestamps
mv public.bak public-2026-09-23 # rename in place; no confirmation
ln -s public-2026-09-23 current # symlink, the basis of atomic deploys
ls -l current && cd - && rm -rf /tmp/siteOutput
total 4.0K drwxr-xr-x 2 dev dev 60 Sep 23 13:18 . drwxr-xr-x 4 dev dev 80 Sep 23 13:18 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 dev dev 15 Sep 23 13:18 index.html lrwxrwxrwx 1 dev dev 17 Sep 23 13:18 current -> public-2026-09-23 /home/dev