Don’t copy and paste. TYPE IT IN! Repetition is how you will learn these commands.
One of the great benefits of the command line is that you have the power. Understand the command that you are typing before pressing enter.
Don’t worry! It’s ok to screw up. It happens to the best of us and it WILL happen. It’s always a great way to learn. We’ll talk about some tips and tricks to help prevent bad things from happening.
Note: All examples here will be prefaced with “Try this now:”. We'll break for a few minutes to try this on our own. Ask questions of the TAs if you run into roadblocks.
A shell is an interface for accessing the underlying commands of an operating system.
This workshop focuses on the Bash shell.
There are a few characters we need to know before we go into more detail. These represent shortcuts to locations.
The tilde is a shortcut representing your home directory. If you use it in a command, it will expand the path for you automatically. For example: ~/is_cool would expand to /Users/jennapederson/is_cool.
The single period represents your current working directory. You will commonly see this when executing a script from the current working directory. For example: ./script.sh. We’ll cover this in more detail in a future section.
The double period represents the parent directory. You’ll use this momentarily when changing directories. For example: cd ../somewhere_else_in_the_parent_directory
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