In my most recent post here on AppleToolBox, I covered the basics of how you can use the Mac terminal. In that post, I briefly touched on how to navigate folders using the Mac terminal. I also promised that I would go into greater detail in a later post so that you can become an expert at navigating your Mac from the command line.
What Is The Cd Command For Mac Os X Terminal
This symbol represents your home directory. Your default home directory might be different from mine (which is justinmeredith). But whatever it is, entering cd into your Mac terminal will instantly bring you back to it.
To delete this file, type rm -i practice_file into your terminal and press return. When asked for confirmation, make sure that you entered the correct file name, type y, then press return again.
Great articles Justin. I have been using Macs almost since the beginning, and terminal to a very limited degree but not really understanding it because I was usually just following some instructions.
The shell performs word splitting on arguments before passing it them to the command you specify. This means it takes the line (or, in some cases, lines) and splits it apart into several words, by default at spaces, tabs, and newlines.
For many non-technical people, the command line (also referred to as CLI, Terminal, bash, or shell) is a place of mystery. However, you only have to know a handful of basic commands to start feeling comfortable.
On a Mac, the most common application for command line gymnastics is "Terminal.app". It comes pre-installed with every Mac OS X system. You'll find it in the "Applications" folder, inside the "Utilities" subfolder.
As the name already implies, the command line is used to execute commands: you type something and confirm the command by hitting ENTER. Most of these commands are dependent on your current location - where "location" means a certain directory or path on your computer.So, let's issue our first command to find out where we currently are:
You can easily remember this command when you know what it stands for: "print working directory". It will return the path to a local folder on your computer's disk.
To change this current working directory, you can use the "cd" command (where "cd" stands for "change directory"). For example, to move one directory upwards (into the current folder's parent folder), you can just call:
Also very important is the "ls" command that lists the file contents of a directory. I suggest you always use this command with two additional options: "-l" formats the output list a little more structured and "-a" also lists "hidden" files (which is helpful when working with version control). Showing the contents of the current directory works as follows:
The command line is quite an all-rounder: it can also display a file's contents - although it won't do this as elegantly as your favorite editor. Nonetheless, there are cases where it's handy to use the command line for this. For example when you only want to take a quick look - or when GUI apps are simply not available because you're working on a remote server.
In a similar way, the "head" command displays the file's first 10 lines, while "tail" shows the last 10 lines. You can simply scroll up and down in the output like you're used to from other applications.
Whenever you're entering file names (including paths to a file or directory), the TAB key comes in very handy. It autocompletes what you've written, which reduces typos very efficiently. For example, when you want to switch to a different directory, you can either type every component of the path yourself:
In case your typed characters are ambiguous (because "dev" could be the "development" or the "developers" folder...), the command line won't be able to autocomplete. In that case, you can hit TAB another time to get all the possible matches shown and can then type a few more characters.
The command line keeps a history of the most recent commands you executed. By pressing the ARROW UP key, you can step through the last commands you called (starting with the most recently used). ARROW DOWN will move forward in history towards the most recent call.
When entering commands, pressing CTRL+A moves the caret to the beginning of the line, while CTRL+E moves it to the end of the line.Finally, not all commands are finished by simply submitting them: some require further inputs from you after hitting return. In case you should ever be stuck in the middle of a command and want to abort it, hitting CTRL+C will cancel that command. While this is safe to do in most situations, please note that aborting a command can of course leave things in an unsteady state.
Whereas historically it was unusual for a front-end dev to stare too deeply into the command line abyss, it has now become a tool that can aid many front-end tasks. Whether using git, grunt or jekyll, there are many tools that require a small amount of terminal knowledge.
Aliases are a godsend for making short work of commonly used commands. They are basically a way of creating a shorthand of a longer command, so that you can then type the shorter command in order to execute it.
When you have created and launched an AWS Linux EC2 instance, you need to be able to connect to it from your computer using the SSH protocol. This data recipe will use the Mac Terminal window command line.
What Is Mac Terminal and How Does It Work? Mac Terminal is a command line emulator you can access on all macOS systems. It allows you to take control of your computer quickly to make specific changes.
When dealing with damaged or lost partitions, simple Terminal commands are not enough to save the day. What you need is specialized partition recovery and repair software like TestDisk, which runs directly in the Terminal app.
The Command Line Tools Package is a small self-contained package available for download separately from Xcode and that allows you to do command line development in macOS. It consists of the macOS SDK and command-line tools such as Clang, which are installed in the /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools directory.
If Xcode is installed on your machine, then there is no need to install them. Xcode comes bundled with all your command-line tools. macOS 10.9 and later includes shims or wrapper executables. These shims, installed in /usr/bin, can map any tool included in /usr/bin to the corresponding one inside Xcode. xcrun is one of such shims, which allows you to find or run any tool inside Xcode from the command line. Use it to invoke any tool within Xcode from the command line as shown in Listing 1.
Note: macOS comes bundled with xcode-select, a command-line tool that is installed in /usr/bin. It allows you to manage the active developer directory for Xcode and other BSD development tools. See its man page for more information.
xcodebuild is a command-line tool that allows you to perform build, query, analyze, test, and archive operations on your Xcode projects and workspaces from the command line. It operates on one or more targets contained in your project, or a scheme contained in your project or workspace. xcodebuild provides several options for performing these operations as seen its man page. xcodebuild saves the output of your commands in the locations defined in the Locations preferences pane of your Xcode application, by default.
To change the output locations of your xcodebuild command, use the SYMROOT (Build Products Path) and DSTROOT (Installation Build Products Location) build settings that respectively specify a location for your debug products and .dSYM files and one for your released products. See Xcode Help's Build setting reference for more information about these build settings.
The test action requires specifying a scheme and a destination. See How do I implement the Build For Testing and Test Without Building features from the command line? for more information about build-for-testing and test-without-building actions.
Important: When using a scheme, test-without-building searches for bundles in the build root (SYMROOT). Therefore, be sure to build your target or that your build root includes the bundles to be tested before running this command. See Xcode Help's Build settings reference for more information about SYMROOT.
where is the name of the file containing your test run parameters. See xcodebuild.xctestrun' s man page for more information about xctestrun files. See How do I run unit tests from the command line? for more information about the other options.
Important: When using an xctestrun file, test-without-building searches for bundles at paths specified in the file. Therefore, be sure that the bundles exist at the specified paths before running this command.
Updated the "How do I run unit tests from the command line?" question.Added the "How do I implement the Build For Testing and Test Without Building features from the command line?" and "What keys can I pass to the exportOptionsPlist flag?" questions.
The final step of the process is to make a copy of your CD or DVD with the Unix dd command. This command reads from the device file /dev/disk2 and writes its output to a file in the current directory named MyDisk.iso:
You might be like me - I used computers for twenty years without ever touching a command prompt. I didn't know anything about it, and it seemed scary and overwhelming. I thought it was something only really advanced users knew anything about. When I inevitably encountered a situation where I had to gain some basic command line knowledge, I discovered how useful and easy it is.
Learning to use the command line will open up endless possibilities for you - it is undoubtedly essential in web development and programming, but even regular users doing everyday tasks will benefit. Follow along in this tutorial and you'll see how simple it is to use, and how powerful it can be. 2ff7e9595c
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