On your disk drive, where you store files, files are organized by the filesystem. The filsystem consists of, among other things, directories and files. Directories can contain contain other directories as well as files.

The pwd command tells you where in the filesystem you are now -- in which directory. The command ls lists the contents of that directory, that is, which other directories and files are in there. The list that ls shows is not a list directly stored somewhere, but generated when you run the command. The command basically asks the filesystem something like "what is the content of the filesystem at this directory", and it gets a reply, then it formats it into a nice list to present to you, the user.

[–] LoveEspresso@retrofed.com 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That means the terminal is directly interacting with my hardware ??

[–] Legianus@programming.dev 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Well no, the terminal is a software like any other. It just is sometimes more final about doing things (e.g. rm <file> will delete without asking twice) and you cab start other software from it or use within.

There are multiple layers between you and your hardware, rings of userspace (Starting with Ring 3) and at the end Kernel (Ring 0)

[–] LoveEspresso@retrofed.com -1 points 12 hours ago

Sound like rings of smoke :)))))