/terminal_basics

I will walk through some of the most basic yet crucial commands you will encounter when starting out with the Terminal.

Objectives

  • Understand what the Terminal is
  • Understand the importance of the Unix philosophy and how it relates to programming
  • Use fundamental Terminal commands to navigate and manipulate the file structure
$ echo "Hello World" >> HelloWorld.txt
$ cat HelloWorld.txt | say

The Command Line Interface

The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a human-computer interface that relies on text inputs and output.

The terminal The Command Line Interface on a Macbook

This means you can type in commands and your computer will execute them!

The Unix philosophy

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

The Command Line Interface (CLI) follows this philophy. The commands you use will be very self-contained and executes on its purpose in the most effective manner.

Opening the CLI

You can access your Terminal on a Macintosh by:

  • Pressing Command + Spacebar
  • Type in terminal
  • Press <enter>

Basic commands

Command Meaning
pwd print working directory
cd change directory
ls list
touch creates a file
rm remove
mkdir make directory
rmdir remove directory
mv move
man user manual

Getting started

In your terminal now, type the following:

Note: The $ stands for the beginning of input in the terminal. You do not type the $

$ cd ~
$ pwd   
$ mkdir TheAwesomeTutorial
$ cd TheAwesomeTutorial
$ touch stanley is cool
$ ls -l
$ mv * ..
$ cd ..
$ ls
$ rm -rf TheAwesomeTutorial stanley is cool

The results

The steps What it looks like in my terminal

Understanding what happened

  1. We changed to the home directory, in my case it's /Users/stanley. The ~ denotes home.
  2. The pwd command printed the current working directory (/Users/stanley).
  3. We created a new directory called TheAwesomeTutorial with the mkdir command.
  4. Within TheAwesomeTutorial directory, we create 3 files called stanley, is, cool, respectively.
  5. With the ls -l command, we were able to get a detailed list all the files within this directory.
  6. We moved all files (The * is a wildcard, it'll match everything) to the directory above (denoted by ..).
  7. We changed to a directory above the current, again with ...
  8. We then removed the directory and the 3 files with the rm -rf command. The -rf stands for recursive with force, which is dangerous when deleting because it's gone forever.

At this point in time..

You are now a practioner of the terminal. Regardless of whether you become a programmer or just want to be more efficient on a computer, these skills will translate to all parts of your life if you become fluent.

Continuing your personal development

Here are some great resources for getting started with the Terminal: