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Intro to the Terminal

What is a terminal?

Before Facebook and selfies and the internet, the first computers had displays which could only show text. All interactions with the computer were done through the "terminal", which is a very simple way to run commands on your computer. Nowadays, most people don't need to use terminals because we have fancy graphical apps that have the same functionality.

For programming, it is often useful to use the terminal so we're going to learn a couple of terminal commands. Each of these commands can be done without a terminal, but you can think of using the terminal as lifting the hood of your car - you can do a lot more stuff and you can see what's happening, but you can also break things a lot faster!

Where is the terminal?

All Macs ship with a terminal that you can use - to find it, search for Terminal in Spotlight.

What do I do with this thing?

You should see a line like

blahblahblah $

in your terminal. This is the prompt and you can type in commands here. Try typing the following command and you should see your username printed out

$ whoami
cookiemonster

Note that the $ is just a convention to denote that what follows is a terminal command. You don't want to type the $ into the terminal.

That's your first terminal command! Another useful command is man, which is short for manual. Try the following

$ man whoami

which should print the manual for the command whoami. To exit the manual, press q. Now let's go through the common commands that you'll be using.

ls

ls will list the files in the current folder (in terminal speak, this is usually called a directory). If you run it, you should see something like this

$ ls
Applications Desktop Documents Downloads Library Movies Music Pictures Public

If you open Finder, you'll notice that the output matches up with what is in your home directory - when the terminal starts, it automatically opens here.

pwd

pwd will print the working directory.

$ pwd
/Users/cookiemonster

cd

cd will change the directory. Note that ls and pwd will reflect the change

$ pwd
/Users/cookiemonster
$ ls
Applications Desktop Documents Downloads Library Movies Music Pictures Public
$ cd Downloads
$ pwd
/Users/cookiemonster/Downloads
$ ls
file-that-i-downloaded.jpg

Other commands

You can use man to learn more about these commands:

  • mkdir
  • touch
  • cp
  • mv
  • rm