I've been given an assignment for school, and we were supposed to set up a virtual machine and install Arch Linux to do our programming assignments. I seem to have successfully installed Arch Linux and am able to log in as a 'root'. All I am presented with is a terminal, which, I'm assuming, is enough to get started.

I've only used Ubuntu a handful of times, so only having the terminal is a bit scary for me, and basically I need someone to point me in the right direction as to how I go from logging in as only the root to writing a program that replicates files (the programming part I should be able to do, I just have no idea how to get started with only a terminal).

Thanks in advance.