An Introduction to the Command-Line (on Unix-like systems)

by Oliver; 2014

3. Getting Started: Opening the Terminal

If you have a Mac, navigate to Applications > Utilities and open the application named "Terminal": If you have a PC, abandon all hope, ye who enter here! Just kidding—partially. None of the native Windows shells, such as cmd.exe or PowerShell, are unix-like. Instead, they're marked with hideous deformities that betray their ignoble origin as grandchildren of the MS-DOS command interpreter. If you didn't have a compelling reason until now to quit using PCs, here you are ^[1]. Typically, my misguided PC friends don't use the command line on their local machines; instead, they have to ssh into some remote server running Linux. (You can do this with an ssh client like PuTTY, Chrome's Terminal Emulator, or MobaXterm, but don't ask me how.) On Macintosh you can start practicing on the command line right away without having to install a Linux distribution ^[2] (the Mac-flavored unix is called Darwin).

For both Mac and PC users who want a bona fide Linux command line, one easy way to get it is in the cloud with Amazon EC2 via the AWS Free Tier. If you want to go whole hog, you can download and install a Linux distribution—Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, and CentOs are popular choices—but this is asking a lot of non-hardcore-nerds (less drastically, you could boot Linux off of a USB drive or run it in a virtual machine).

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^{[1] I should admit, you can and should get around this by downloading something like Cygwin, whose homepage states: "Get that Linux feeling - on Windows" ↑
[2] However, if you're using Mac OS rather than Linux, note that OS does not come with the GNU coreutils, which are the gold standard. You should download them ↑}

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