Rakesh Jha

Back to Top

Unix Terminal Commands

Published on 16 February 2014 with .

Table of Contents

The terminal is an extremely useful tool for any advanced computer user. It can allow you to perform tasks at a rapid rate, often faster than using a GUI. Today, I'll show you guys a couple of commands that are available in any Unix terminal. However, this is just a starter list of commands. Discover more commands here!

Commands

  1. man
    This is an essential command to learn as it will allow you to look up the manual for any command. In essence, it will bring up a tutorial for a certain command. For example, man man will bring up information about the man command.

  2. ls
    This command will list files that are not hidden in the current directory. If you include the optional -a flag, as in ls -a, the terminal will allow you to see all of the files in the current directory, including the hidden ones. This is useful if you want to see hidden files occasionally and do not want the option to be the system default.

  3. cd
    The command cd is another vital command to learn. It will allow you to change the directory, as the name implies. For example, if you are in the directory /test and you wanted to change to the directory /test/anothertest, then you would use the command cd anothertest. This would not work if you are not in the /test directory because the cd command would not know where to look. In order to look outside of the current directory, you would use ... For example, if the directory you are looking for is /brains which is a parent directory of /test, then you would use cd ...

  4. touch
    This command is used to create new files in the current directory (if you want to retrieve the current directory, use pwd). If I wanted to create two new HTML files called one.html and two.html in the current directory, I would type: touch one.html two.html.

  5. mkdir
    The name of this command represents the words make directory. It is used exactly for that purpose, making a new directory (or folder) in the current directory. Typing mkdir test would create a directory named test in the current directory. Note that if you want the name to contain spaces, you would type the name in double quotes (like this: mkdir "a name with spaces in it").

  6. open
    This will open files or directories that you pass to it. For example, open . will open the current directory, where . represents the current directory (note that . can be used in other commands as well).

Workflow

Now let's use the commands we just learned in a sample workflow that you, a developer or another person, might use during a typical day.

  1. First, create a folder for a new project with mkdir "My Awesome Project".

  2. Then, change the directory to that folder with cd "My Awesome Project".

  3. Next, create an index.html file and a directory for CSS and JavaScript. The following will do the trick: touch index.html; mkdir css js;. Note that semicolons (;) are used to combine one or more commands onto a single line.

  4. Finally, open the current directory using open ..

Closing

There you have it! A list of some simple commands to get you started with Unix terminal! Feel free to add comments below to point out more commands or help others!