The second quote there is odd... It looks like you copied and pasted pludi's post directly. A couple of pointers:

1) The $ is a prompt. It's not part of the command. Ignore the $ and the space following it. Just copy and paste the rest of the line. I suspect that this is why your cat commands failed.
2) In pludi's example, the lines without the $ are output. Don't copy and paste them.

These are the commands that should be copied and pasted:

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | awk -F: '/MHz/ { total++; print "CPU"total": "$2}'

and

Code:

cat /proc/memifo | grep -i total

Or, if you want to see complete output, just remove the pipe and everything after it from each command.