How to Terminal

Sometimes it is usefull to leave the world of a mouse and type commands at a command prompt in a termial. The commands are a bit different on Mac and Windows, but we will try to show both.

How to get a command prompt

You need to use a progam that you can type these commands in. On Mac, that would be Terminal, and on Windows, that is CMD.exe. (new windows have powershell, but we will just use CMD)

Where am I?

When you first open a terminal, or command prompt, you will be in your "home" directory. That is your users base directory. You can see where this is by typing pwd Hit enter. On Chris Wards Mac, that would be /Users/cward

Lets move!

Folders are also called directories, so the command to move into, or change the directory is cd On a Mac there is a folder called Documents. On Windows there is a folder called 'My Documents' Lets go there.

cd Documents or cd "My Documents"

If you want to back up, type cd ..

What is in there?

Go back to the documents folder you were in. Type ls. This shows a list of the files in the folder you are in. Now lets add a switch. Type ls -la You should now see a lot more files that start with a .. We call this dot files, or hidden files.

Do I have to be in the folder to see what is in there?

Nope. There are are absolute, and relative paths. A path is like the URL or directory structure to get to another folder or file.

So, type cd ~. That will take you to your user directory. Now type ls Documents/Pictures on a Mac, or ls "My Documents"\Pictures on Windows. Those commands will show the listing of files inside the RELATIVE path you specified. Now lets do ABSOLUTE paths. ls /Users/cward/Documents/Pictures on Chris Wards Mac. You would have to put your own user name in place of cward. On windows it would be ls C:\Users\cward\"My Documents"\Pictures Again you would need your user instead of cward. You can do that with most of the commands we look at.

Can I see what is in a file?

Some of them. You can dump out the contents of a text file with cat and the name of the file. On a Mac, or Linux you can use nano and the name of the file. Look at the control command help at the bottom of the screen. On windows you can launch notepad by typing notepad.exe and the name of the file. (There are lots of text editors on Windows and Mac, but we aren't going to get into them here)

How to create a directory?

Type mkdir and the name of the directory. You can then cd into it.

Remove it with rmdir and the name of the directory. You can only do this if all the files inside the directory are deleted.

How to delete files then?

Delete a single file with rm and the name of the file. You will need the extension, not just the name. You can also delete all the txt files with rm *.txt or every file with rm *.* Careful with that one.

Can I copy a file into a directory I made?

Sure. If we are in a folder with a test.txt file. We would copy it to the test folder with cp test.txt test We would move it with mv test.txt test

Is there a common code folder on the programming laptops?

Yes. On the programming laptops there is a directory where code is stored. Hopefaully it is in the same place on all machines. We can swith to there with cd ~/source/repos

Is that it?

No, there are tones of commands, but those are some basics to get you going. This intro will be enough to get you started. Might you try out Git next?