what happens when you type ls -l and hit Enter in a shell ?

You may be new to coding. You crack open a coding book with exercises, or even enroll in a coding school, and the first thing you see is shell exercises. You ask yourself, “What? Why do I need to know this when I just want to code? Why can’t I use the GUI instead?” Well, this little example will show you the usefulness of knowing how to use the shell.

Let’s consider the command: ls -l

We will start by breaking this down step by step. When you open your terminal application, type ls, and hit enter, you are greeted with a list of the files and directories in your current directory. If you want to know more, type man ls for the manual page.

and the when typing ls -l the enables us to list all the files that are hiden and also show all the long list format files that are invisible

Hopefully this has shed some light on the utility of the shell.