Basic terminal commands

Let’s learn the commands you will use most often in the terminal.

pwd: check your current location

The terminal always works in a particular folder. First, find out which folder you are in.

pwd

pwd stands for print working directory. It displays the path of your current folder.

ls / dir: list files and folders

Use the following command to see what is in the current folder.

ls

dir

ls and dir list the files and folders in the current directory. The names are short for “list” and “directory.”

mkdir: create a folder

Create a folder named playground.

mkdir playground

mkdir stands for make directory: it creates a new folder.

cd: change folders

Move into the playground folder you just created.

cd playground

cd stands for change directory. Run pwd afterward and you should see playground at the end of the path.

Use .. to return to the parent folder.

cd ..

touch / ni: create a file

Move back into playground with cd playground, then create a file named memo.txt.

touch memo.txt

ni memo.txt

touch creates the file if it does not exist, or updates its modification time if it does. In PowerShell, ni is an alias for New-Item.

Run ls or dir to check that memo.txt appears in the list.

rm / rmdir: delete files and folders

Delete the file you just created, move to the parent folder, then delete the empty playground folder.

rm memo.txt
cd ..
rmdir playground

rm memo.txt
cd ..
rm playground

rm means remove, and rmdir means remove directory. In PowerShell, rm is an alias for Remove-Item. On macOS, rmdir removes only empty folders. Commands also exist for deleting folders together with their contents, but we will leave those aside here to avoid accidentally deleting important files.

Exercises

Use the terminal to create and then delete a playground folder and a note.txt file in this order.

1. Create a folder named playground.
2. Move into playground.
3. Create note.txt.
4. Check that note.txt appears in the file list.
5. Delete note.txt, then delete the playground folder.

mkdir playground
cd playground

touch note.txt
ls
rm note.txt

ni note.txt
dir
rm note.txt

cd ..

rmdir playground

rm playground