3. Command line overview

3.1. What it is

Command line is the text input and output environment that allows us to process commands on the computer. We refer to these terminal instances as "windows"

3.2. Common commands

This will output your current working directory:

pwd

This will output whatever is passed into the terminal:

echo Hello World

This will output the contents of the directory you are in:

ls

We can also pass in the -a flag to show hidden files in the directory

ls -a

The cd command stands for change directory. This allows us to traverse the filesystem via the terminal. To go up a directory:

cd ..

To go into a directory replace <DirectoryName> with the actual directory name:

cd <DirectoryName>

The mkdir command stands for make directory. We can use this to create new folders:

mkdir testFolder

The touch command is used to create a new file. You can add any extension you want but for this example we are creating a txt file.

touch testfile.txt

The cat command is used to display the contents of a file.

cat testfile.txt

Exercise

1. Let's create a directory called Assessor
2. Change directory to get into the Assessor directory
3. Output your current working directory
4. Create a file called example.txt
5. Open the file example.txt and type something in there
6. Back in the terminal display the contents of the example.txt file