Chapter 2 The Command Line
The command-line is an interface to a computer—a way for you (the human) to communicate with the machine. But unlike common graphical interfaces that use windows, icons, menus, and pointers, the command-line is text-based: you type commands instead of clicking on icons. The command-line lets you do everything you’d normally do by clicking with a mouse, but by typing in a manner similar to programming!
An example of the command-line in action (from Wikipedia).
The command-line is not as friendly or intuitive as a graphical interface: it’s much harder to learn and figure out. However, it has the advantage of being both more powerful and more efficient in the hands of expert users. (It’s faster to type than to move a mouse, and you can do lots of “clicks” with a single command). The command-line is also used when working on remote servers or other computers that for some reason do not have a graphical interface enabled. Thus, command line is an essential tool for all professional developers, particularly when working with large amounts of data or files.
This chapter will give you a brief introduction to basic tasks using the command-line: enough to get you comfortable navigating the interface and able to interpret commands.
2.1 Accessing the Command-Line
In order to use the command-line, you will need to open a command shell (a.k.a. a command prompt). This is a program that provides the interface to type commands into. You should have installed a command shell (hereafter “the terminal”) as part of setting up your machine.
Once you open up the shell (Terminal or Git Bash), you should see something like this (red notes are added):
A newly opened command-line.
This is the textual equivalent of having opened up Finder or File Explorer and having it show you the user’s “Home” folder. The text shown lets you know:
- What machine you’re currently interfacing with (you can use the command-line to control different computers across a network or the internet).
- What directory (folder) you are currently looking at (
~is a shorthand for the “home directory”). - What user you are logged in as.
After that you’ll see the prompt (typically denoted as the $ symbol), which is where you will type in your commands.
2.2 Navigating the Command Line
Although the command-prompt gives you the name of the folder you’re in, you might like more detail about where that folder is. Time to send your first command! At the prompt, type:
This stands for print working directory (shell commands are highly abbreviated to make them faster to type), and will tell the computer to print the folder you are currently “in”.
Fun fact: technically, this command usually starts a tiny program (app) that does exactly one thing: prints the working directory. When you run a command, you’re actually executing a tiny program! And when you run programs (tiny or large) on the command-line, it looks like you’re typing in commands.
Folders on computers are stored in a hierarchy: each folder has more folders inside it, which have more folders inside them. This produces a tree structure which on a Mac may look like:
A Directory Tree, from Bradnam and Korf.
You describe what folder you are in putting a slash / between each folder in the tree: thus /Users/iguest means “the iguest folder, which is inside the Users folder”.
At the very top (or bottom, depending on your point of view) is the root / directory‐which has no name, and so is just indicated with that single slash. So /Users/iguest really means “the iguest folder, which is inside the Users folder, which is inside the root folder”.
A Note about Windows: while Mac (and other unix computers) use / as the root directory of the while system, Windows normally uses This PC on Explorer and similar graphical frontends, followed by the drive letters like C:\, followed by folder names separeted by backslashes. gitbash uses a unix-style filesystem tree approach with / replacing This PC, backslashes with forward slashes, and drive letters must be used without colon. So C:\Users\Xiaotian\Desktop can be accessed as /c/Users/Xiatioan/Desktop.
2.2.1 Changing Directories
What if you want to change folders? In a graphical system like Finder, you would just double-click on the folder to open it. But there’s no clicking on the command-line.
This includes clicking to move the cursor to an earlier part of the command you typed. You’ll need to use the left and right arrow keys to move the cursor instead!
Protip: The up and down arrow keys will let you cycle though your previous commands so you don’t need to re-type them!
Since you can’t click on a folder, you’ll need to use another command:
The first word is the command, or what you want the computer to do. In this case, you’re issuing the command that means change directory.
The second word is an example of an argument, which is a programming term that means “more details about what to do”. In this case, you’re providing a required argument of what folder you want to change to! (You’ll of course need to replace folder_name with the name of the folder).
- Try changing to the
Desktopfolder, which should be inside the home folder you started in—you could see it in Finder or File Explorer!A note about Desktop on Windows: If you’re on Windows and the contents of your Desktop in the terminal doesn’t match the contents of your actual Desktop, your computer may be configured to have your Desktop in a different directory. This usually happens if you’ve set up software to back up your Desktop to an online service. Instead of
~/Desktop, check if your Desktop folder is really in~/OneDrive/Desktopor~/Dropbox/Desktop. - After you change folders, try printing your current location. Can you see that it has changed?
2.2.2 Listing Files
In a graphical system, once you’ve double-clicked on a folder, Finder will show you the contents of that folder. The command-line doesn’t do this automatically; instead you need another command:
This command says to list the folder contents. Note that the argument here is written in brackets ([]) to indicate that it is optional. If you just issue the ls command without an argument, it will list the contents of the current folder. If you include the optional argument (leaving off the brackets), you can “peek” at the contents of a folder you are not currently in.
Warning: The command-line can be not great about giving feedback for your actions. For example, if there are no files in the folder, then ls will simply show nothing, potentially looking like it “didn’t work”. Or when typing a password, the letters you type won’t show (not even as *) as a security measure.
Just because you don’t see any results from your command/typing, doesn’t mean it didn’t work! Trust in yourself, and use basic commands like ls and pwd to confirm any changes if you’re unsure. Take it slow, one step at a time.
2.2.3 Paths
Note that both the cd and ls commands work even for folders that are not “immediately inside” the current directory! You can refer to any file or folder on the computer by specifying its path. A file’s path is “how you get to that file”: the list of folders you’d need to click through to get to the file, with each folder separated by a /:
cd /Users/iguest/Desktop/This says to start at the root directory (that initial /), then go to Users, then go to iguest, then to Desktop.
Because this path starts with a specific directory (the root directory), it is referred to as an absolute path. No matter what folder you currently happen to be in, that path will refer to the correct file because it always starts on its journey from the root.
Contrast that with:
cd iguest/Desktop/Because this path doesn’t have the leading slash, it just says to “go to the iguest/Desktop folder from the current location”. It is known as a relative path: it gives you directions to a file relative to the current folder. As such, the relative path iguest/Desktop/ path will only refer to the correct location if you happen to be in the /Users folder; if you start somewhere else, who knows where you’ll end up!
You should always use relative paths, particularly when programming! Because you’ll almost always be managing multiples files in a project, you should refer to the files relatively within your project. That way, you program can easily work across computers. For example, if your code refers to /Users/your-user-name/project-name/data, it can only run on the your-user-name account. However, if you use a relative path within your code (i.e., project-name/data), the program will run on multiple computers (crucial for collaborative projects).
You can refer to the “current folder” by using a single dot .. So the command
means “list the contents of the current folder” (the same thing you get if you leave off the argument).
If you want to go up a directory, you use two dots: .. to refer to the parent folder (that is, the one that contains this one). So the command
means “list the contents of the folder that contains the current folder”.
Note that . and .. act just like folder names, so you can include them anywhere in paths: ../../my_folder says to go up two directories, and then into my_folder.
Protip: Most command shells like Terminal and Git Bash support tab-completion. If you type out just the first few letters of a file or folder name and then hit the tab key, it will automatically fill in the rest of the name! If the name is ambiguous (e.g., you type Do and there is both a Documents and a Downloads folder), you can hit tab twice to see the list of matching folders. Then add enough letters to distinguish them and tab to complete! This will make your life a lot easier.
Additionally, you can use a tilde ~ as shorthand for the home directory of the current user. Just like . refers to “current folder”, ~ refers to the user’s home directory (usually /Users/USERNAME on mac or /c/Users/USERNAME on windows). And of course, you can use the tilde as part of a path as well (e.g., ~/Desktop is an absolute path to the desktop for the current user).
A note about home directory on Windows: unlike unix, windows does not have a consistent concept of home directory, and different programs may interpret it in a different way. For instance, gitbash assumes the home directory is /c/Users/USERNAME while R assumes it is /c/Users/USERNAME/Desktop.
As you perhaps noticed above, command line uses space as a separator between the command and additional arguments. This means it is more complicated to work with paths and file names that contain a space. For instance, if you want to change into a folder called my folder, then issuing cd my folder results in an error (“cd: too many arguments”). This is because cd thinks that my is folder name, and folder after space is an additional argument. But there are two ways to handle spaces: first, you can put your pathname in quotes like cd "my folder", and second, you can escape the space with a backslash: cd my\ folder. Both of these options work reasonably well but in general we recommend to avoid spaces in file names whenever you work with command line.
2.3 File Commands
Once you’re comfortable navigating folders in the command-line, you can start to use it to do all the same things you would do with Finder or File Explorer, simply by using the correct command. Here is an short list of commands to get you started using the command prompt, though there are many more:
| Command | Behavior |
|---|---|
mkdir |
make a directory |
rm |
remove a file or folder |
cp |
copy a file from one location to another |
open |
opens a file or folder (Mac only) |
start |
opens a file or folder (Windows only) |
cat |
concatenate (combine) file contents and display the results |
history |
show previous commands executed |
Warning: The command-line makes it dangerously easy to permanently delete multiple files or folders and will not ask you to confirm that you want to delete them (or move them to the “recycling bin”). Be very careful when using the terminal to manage your files, as it is very powerful.
Be aware that many of these commands won’t print anything when you run them. This often means that they worked; they just did so quietly. If it doesn’t work, you’ll know because you’ll see a message telling you so (and why, if you read the message). So just because you didn’t get any output doesn’t mean you did something wrong—you can use another command (such as ls) to confirm that the files or folders changed the way you wanted!
2.3.1 Learning New Commands
How can you figure out what kind of arguments these commands take? You can look it up! This information is available online, but many command shells (though not Git Bash, unfortunately) also include their own manual you can use to look up commands!
Will show the manual for the mkdir program/command.
Because manuals are often long, they are opened up in a command-line viewer called less. You can “scroll” up and down by using the arrow keys. Hit the q key to quit and return to the command-prompt.
The mkdir man page.
If you look under “Synopsis” you can see a summary of all the different arguments this command understands. A few notes about reading this syntax:
Recall that anything in brackets
[]is optional. Arguments that are not in brackets (e.g.,directory_name) are required.“Options” (or “flags”) for command-line programs are often marked with a leading dash
-to make them distinct from file or folder names. Options may change the way a command-line program behaves—like how you might set “easy” or “hard” mode in a game. You can either write out each option individually, or combine them:mkdir -p -vandmkdir -pvare equivalent.- Some options may require an additional argument beyond just indicating a particular operation style. In this case, you can see that the
-moption requires you to specify an additionalmodeparameter; see the details below for what this looks like.
- Some options may require an additional argument beyond just indicating a particular operation style. In this case, you can see that the
Underlined arguments are ones you choose: you don’t actually type the word
directory_name, but instead your own directory name! Contrast this with the options: if you want to use the-poption, you need to type-pexactly.
Command-line manuals (“man pages”) are often very difficult to read and understand: start by looking at just the required arguments (which are usually straightforward), and then search for and use a particular option if you’re looking to change a command’s behavior.
For practice, try to read the man page for rm and figure out how to delete a folder and not just a single file. Note that you’ll want to be careful, as this is a good way to break things.
2.4 Dealing With Errors
Note that the syntax of these commands (how you write them out) is very important. Computers aren’t good at figuring out what you meant if you aren’t really specific; forgetting a space may result in an entirely different action.
Try another command: echo lets you “echo” (print out) some text. Try echoing "Hello World" (which is the traditional first computer program):
What happens if you forget the closing quote? You keep hitting “enter” but you just get that > over and over again! What’s going on?
- Because you didn’t “close” the quote, the shell thinks you are still typing the message you want to echo! When you hit “enter” it adds a line break instead of ending the command, and the
>marks that you’re still going. If you finally close the quote, you’ll see your multi-line message printed!
IMPORTANT TIP If you ever get stuck in the command-line, hit ctrl-c (The control and c keys together). This almost always means “cancel”, and will “stop” whatever program or command is currently running in the shell so that you can try again. Just remember: “ctrl-c to flee”.
(If that doesn’t work, try hitting the esc key, or typing exit, q, or quit. Those commands will cover most command-line programs).
Throughout this book, we’ll discuss a variety of approaches to handling errors in computer programs. While it’s tempting to disregard dense error messages, many programs do provide error messages that explain what went wrong. If you enter an unrecognized command, the terminal will inform you of your mistake:
However, forgetting arguments yields different results. In some cases, there will be a default behavior (see what happens if you enter cd without any arguments). If more information is required to run a command, your terminal will provide you with a brief summary of the command’s usage:
Take the time to read the error message and think about what the problem might be before you try again.