Where is the Command Line?

Section 2.2 Where is the Command Line?

If you have a computer, you have a terminal. You may not have ever used it or known it was there, but it’s hiding, waiting for use. Let’s find it.

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Subsection 2.2.1 On a Mac

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Luckily, the terminal is easy to find on a Mac: it’s called terminal.app and can be found in numerous ways.

(Recommended) Press Command + Space to open Spotlight Search. Start typing “terminal” and the app should pop up quickly. Press Enter or click on the result.
Navigate to the Applications folder in the Finder. Then, open the Utilities folder and double click on terminal.app
Find it through the Launchpad. What’s the Launchpad, you ask? On most Mac keyboards, it is on the key corresponding to F4 and looks like a bunch of boxes arranged in rows. You can also access the Launchpad by clicking the Launchpad icon in the Dock (also boxes arranged in rows) or by going into the Applications folder in the Finder and double clicking on the Launchpad.app icon.

Once in the Launchpad, find the Terminal. You can either search for it in the search bar at the tope of the screen or scroll through your apps until you find it. (Note: it might be in the Other folder).

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Optional: Shells.

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Over the course of your experiences with the command line and Git, you may hear talk of (or see references to) “shells”. A shell is an style of program used to interact with and talk to the heart of your computer (see IBM ²⁶ for some more information). For the purposes of this book, you will not need to understand shells nor need to change shells. Since you are learning, stick with what ever defaults your terminal gives you. As you become more experienced, you can start thinking about exploring shells in more detail. See Appendix A when you are ready for this.

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Subsection 2.2.2 On Windows

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For Windows users, the situation is a slightly more complicated. The underlying makeup of the operating systems on Windows is differet than the basis for MacOS and other Unix-like systems (such as Linux). This means that certain applications for Windows do not have a MacOS compliment (and likewise some Mac applications do not have Windows versions). In addition, the file system and organization are different bewteen the two.

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Separate instructions must be given for Windows users for certain tasks. To make life easier for you, me, and everyone else, I recommend not using the default Windows terminal.

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Instead, let’s use a new terminal (Git Bash) that works with Git and conveniently uses the bash shell which allows me to use the same instructions for Mac as Windows. Detailed download instructions can be found in Materials: Windows. I will assume that you are using Git Bash for the remainder of the book.

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Subsection 2.2.3 On Linux

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This will depend on the version and distribution you have installed. For this reason, I will not be able to provide instructions here. Please use the internet for help. Contributions for your specific distribution are welcome through a pull request or issue on GitHub.

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