Everything about WebTerm's free online Linux terminal: which commands work, what to try first, and how the sandbox keeps your experiments safe.
Free Play is an online Linux terminal you can use directly in your browser: a safe sandbox for practicing Linux commands with no installation, no sign-up, and nothing to break.
What you can do here
The sandbox starts you in a home directory with a realistic file tree. From there you can do anything you would do in a normal shell:
ls -la # look around, including hidden files
cd documents # move through directories
cat notes.txt # read files
mkdir projects # build your own structure
The file tree on the left updates live as you create, move, and delete files, so you can see exactly what each command did.
Supported commands
WebTerm implements over a hundred Linux commands, faithful to their real behavior:
- Files and directories:
ls, cd, pwd, cat, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, touch, find, tree, ln
- Text processing:
grep, sed, awk, sort, uniq, head, tail, wc, cut, tr, diff
- Permissions and users:
chmod, chown, whoami, id, sudo
- Processes and system:
ps, kill, top, jobs, df, du, uname
- Archives:
tar, gzip, zip, bzip2
- Editors:
vim (with modal editing)
- Version control: the full
git workflow
Pipes (|), redirects (>, >>), and command chaining (&&, ;) work as they do in a real shell, so one-liners like this run fine:
grep -r "TODO" . | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
A safe place to be dangerous
Everything runs in a virtual file system inside your browser. That makes Free Play the right place to try the commands you would never risk on a real machine:
Curious what rm -rf / actually does? Here, the honest answer is: try it and find out. Your real files are never involved.
Reloading the page resets the environment to a clean state, so no experiment is ever permanent.
Where to go next
If you want structure instead of a blank prompt, the guided tutorials run in this same terminal, with missions that check your progress.
- All tutorials: start with terminal basics and build up through everyday Linux commands
- Terminal basics: cursor keys, history and tab completion, the things you need before memorising commands
- Practice Git in your browser:
init, commit, branches and merges, plus recovering from merge conflicts and lost commits