Welcome to Terminal

Sometime also known as shell, AKa your best friend

By - Ashish Singh

Engineer at NextFuturegenz

What is Terminal ?

The terminal, also known as the command line interface (CLI), is a powerful tool for interacting with your computer's operating system. While it may seem intimidating at first, mastering the basics of the terminal can greatly increase your efficiency and productivity. In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of using the terminal on a Mac or Linux system.

Opening Terminal:

To open the terminal on a Mac, you can use the Spotlight search feature by pressing Command + Spacebar and typing in "terminal." Alternatively, you can navigate to the Applications folder in Finder, open the Utilities folder, and then double-click on the Terminal app.

On Linux systems, you can usually access the terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T. If this doesn't work, you can try searching for "terminal" in your system's application launcher.

Navigating through directories:

Once you have opened the terminal, you will be presented with a command prompt. This is where you can enter commands to interact with your system. The first thing you will want to do is navigate to the directory where you want to work.

To see what directory you are currently in, you can use the "pwd" command (short for "print working directory"). This will print the full path of the current directory to the terminal.

To navigate to a different directory, you can use the "cd" command (short for "change directory"). For example, if you want to navigate to a directory called "Documents" in your home directory, you can type:

$ cd ~/Documents
                            

The tilde (~) symbol is a shortcut that represents your home directory. This command will change your current directory to "Documents" within your home directory.

To navigate up one directory level, you can use the ".." (double dot) notation. For example, if you are in the "Documents" directory and want to navigate up to your home directory, you can type:

$ cd ..
                            

This will change your current directory to your home directory.

Basic commands:

Now that you know how to navigate through directories, let's take a look at some basic commands you can use in the terminal.

• ls - This command will list the contents of the current directory. You can add the "-l" flag to get a detailed listing that includes file permissions, ownership, and modification date.


• mkdir - This command will create a new directory. For example, if you want to create a directory called "myfolder" in your current directory, you can type: mkdir myfolder


• touch - This command will create a new empty file. For example, if you want to create a file called "myfile.txt" in your current directory, you can type: touch myfile.txt


• rm - This command will remove a file or directory. Use with caution! For example, if you want to remove a file called "myfile.txt" in your current directory, you can type: rm myfile.txt


• cp - This command will copy a file from one location to another. For example, if you want to copy a file called "myfile.txt" from your current directory to a directory called "backup" within your home directory, you can type: cp myfile.txt ~/backup/