Oh thank you Laura, I did manage to display the famous line on my screen after your suggestion about removing the | lpr option. You're right about the man command as well: I typed man ls and it gave me the manual on the list directory command. So far so good. The only thing I don't know is, is that |lpr option supposed to "pipe" the output to my printer or they at school have a dozen of the lines already printed out from their printer? Anyways, what I heard in the class last Monday was music to my ears although the instructor is little bit biased towards Linux; he mostly spoke about Unix/Linux vs. Windows comparison. And he told us that the Unix (Linux) is an "experts' tool" which made me ... hehehehe ... feel good. My question this time is how do I retrieve &/or edit previously entered commands with PuTTY? The shell we are using is bash. Many thanks! Ned