Fri Nov 02, 2007 7:53 pm by D3vk1t
Mac OS X’s Terminal application. There it sits in your Utilities folder, foreign and mysterious. You’ve heard that it's a portal to the new world of the Unix command line, a world where your flurries of mouse clicks can be replaced with a just few keystrokes.
But you’ve been wary of rushing into this new territory where the keyboard is king, concerned that without enough knowledge you might get lost, or stuck, or worse. Or maybe you're an adventurer who is just waiting to dive into uncharted waters.
This article is for you. Regardless of why you've previously avoided [localhost:~] yourname%, I'll show you how to take your first steps with the Terminal application. Then, I'll walk you through a tutorial that will accelerate your understanding of the Unix command line.
In Part 1 of this series, you’ll learn more about what Terminal does and get an overview of the tutorial procedure. You’ll then jump into the tutorial itself to learn the fundamental Unix commands you’ll need to know to get started with just about any command-line procedure.
Then, in Part 2, you’ll finish the rest of the tutorial, as well as learn a few more things you can do with the command line.
The command-line interface
The command-line interface (CLI) displayed in Terminal's windows provides access to the Unix shell, which is really just another way to interact with your Mac. The other method that you're probably more comfortable with is the Aqua interface. Aqua enables you to click on icons and menus, and to launch graphical applications by telling the Mac what to do.
The shell, on the other hand, allows you to type text commands to accomplish much of the same work. Typically, these typed commands launch tiny, single-duty Unix applications that do specific jobs and then quit. The shell itself is an application that plays the go-between for the commands that you enter and the Unix kernel at the core of Mac OS X. There are in fact several shells available. By default Mac OS X uses a shell called tcsh.
If you're curious about why you would want to use the shell in the first place, see the article Why Use a Command Line Instead of Windows? for more information about the CLI vs. the Aqua interface.
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