Online Linux Terminal

Practise Linux commands in a real Linux system that runs entirely in your browser. Press Start and you get a root shell on a small throwaway machine: try grep, awk, chmod, vi or rm -rf without touching a server. It has no network, keeps nothing after you leave, and nothing you type is sent to us.

How it works

The terminal is a small PC emulated in your browser. v86 translates x86 machine code to WebAssembly, boots a real Linux 6.12 kernel and gives you a root shell on its serial console, shown with xterm.js. The Linux image is a minimal system we built with Buildroot: BusyBox for the standard commands, plus nano, htop, jq, tree and file. The machine has 128 MB of memory, no disk and no network card, so it cannot reach the internet or our servers. When it is ready you see the prompt root@srvscripts:~#.

Everything you do stays in this browser tab. Files you create live in memory and are gone when you press Restart or reload the page, so you can try destructive commands such as rm -rf without risk.

What to practise

• Moving around: pwd, ls -la, cd, mkdir -p, cp, mv, rm, find / -name "*.conf".
• Reading logs: grep, awk, sed, sort | uniq -c, head and tail on the sample examples/auth.log.
• Permissions: chmod, chown, umask and ls -l; our chmod calculator explains the numbers.
• Processes: ps, top, htop, kill, background jobs with &, jobs and fg.
• Editing: vi and nano, then check the result with cat or diff.
• JSON: jq on examples/disk.json.

Our Linux commands cheat sheet and terminal cheat sheet list the commands and shortcuts by task.

Is the online Linux terminal safe?

Yes, for you, for this website and for everyone else. Nothing you type runs on our server: the whole machine is a program inside your browser tab, so a command such as rm -rf / or a fork bomb can only break that throwaway copy, and Restart gives you a clean one. It cannot reach this site, its hosting or any other server, because the network is removed three times over:

• No network card. The emulated PC is started with no network device at all.
• No network stack. The Linux kernel is built without networking (CONFIG_NET off), so even a socket fails with Function not implemented.
• No network tools. wget, curl, nc, ping, telnet, ssh and the other network commands are left out of the image.

On top of that, the page itself may only load files from srvscripts.com (its Content-Security-Policy), and the emulator has no way to open connections of its own. The prompt shows root@srvscripts:~#: you are root inside the toy machine, not on any real system.

Limits

Most commands come from BusyBox, which implements the common options of GNU coreutils, grep, sed and awk but not every one; a long option that works on AlmaLinux or Ubuntu may be missing here. There is no package manager, no systemd and no network, so dnf, apt, systemctl, ping and curl are not available. Emulation is slower than a real server, so heavy commands take a while. For those, use a cheap VPS or a local virtual machine.

Source code and licences

The emulator is v86 (BSD-2-Clause) with the SeaBIOS and VGA BIOS files it ships (LGPL-3.0), and the terminal is xterm.js (MIT). The Linux image contains the Linux kernel, BusyBox and other free software under the GPL and other licences. The complete corresponding source code, build configuration and licence texts for that image are available at srvscripts.com/…/srvscripts-linux-sources/. The srvScripts Linux terminal page, its start-up files and the image build are © 2026 srvScripts.com; every other program keeps its own copyright and licence.

Official documentation (checked 9 October 2026): v86 x86 emulator · Buildroot manual · xterm.js

Frequently asked questions