To get down into the nuts and bolts of the computer, we need to use something called the command line. It’s also called the terminal, bash prompt, shell, or a hundred other weird names. Whenever you’re using it people who walk by notice will be amazed! …and ask if you can change their grades or fix their printer.

Getting to the command line is a little different depending on what operating system you use, though, so bear with me for a moment.

Mac OS X, all versions (Terminal)

OS X is built on top of something called Darwin, which is built on something else called BSD, which is flavor of something you may have heard of called Linux. All of that is really just a boring way of saying “the command line is easy to use and works great in OS X.” Lucky you!

To use the command line (a.k.a. Terminal) in OS X, click the little magnifying glass in the top right-hand corner and type “Terminal.” It should show up, you can click it, and tada! It works.

If it doesn’t show up, you’ll need to open up your Applications folder, then go into Utilities, and finally track down Terminal.

To open the command line on OS X, run the Terminal application.

Windows, all versions

There are two ways to use the command line on Windows, the Command Prompt or PowerShell (technically there are a lot more, but we’ll stick with these).

I personally like PowerShell, if only because it has a nicer autocomplete than Command Prompt. To run it, click the Start menu, then type PowerShell to find it.

To open the command line on Windows, run the PowerShell application.

The OS X command line is based on Linux, which is the same breed of software that most servers in the world run. Our classes are focused on these popular Linux-compatible commands, which are usually are the same as PowerShell-compatible commands (at least for the simple stuff).

A few important ones are different, though, but I’ll be sure to point them out when we come across them! You’ll just need to memorize that when I say grep you’ll use select-string instead (or make a convenient cheat sheet).

When you cut and paste in PowerShell, you sadly can’t use ctrl+c and ctrl+v - you’ll need to click the box in the upper left-hand corner and pick them out from the Edit menu.