Intro to Terminal Interactions

• Purpose - To learn basic command line skills to later be leveraged when using other command line tools.

Glossary of Terms

• Shell - a program used to interpret input from, and send output to, the terminal
• Terminal - a text-based interface used to interact with the shell
• Resource - an allocation of memory which has the propencity to be occupied by a file.
• File - a particular instance of allocated memory used for recording data on a storage device.
• File System - a relational structure (hierarchical relations) of files and directories.
• File Explorer - a graphical representation of a file system.
• File Path - the uniquely named location for a particular file.
• Directory - a special type of file which has reference to other files, and possibly other directories
• Folder - a graphical representation of a directory
• Home Directory - the directory containing files for a given user on a multiuser operating system
• Current Working Directory - the directory presently referenced in the terminal, thus referenced by the shell.
• Parent Directory - a directory containing another directory; the directory “above” another directory
• Child Directory - a directory contained by another directory; the directory “below” another directory
• Dev Directory - a child directory of the home directory that is used to store application-development-projects and local-code-bases
• Root Directory - the parent directory of a particular file system or subsystem
• Command - a key word that is executed in the terminal, thus executed by the shell, to access and interact with a particularly program or service.
• Alias - a symbol used to refer to a particular filepath.

Instructions

Section A - Configuring File System for Application Development

• The purpose of the following section is to familiarize with basic commands while also creating the conventional file-system structure for application-development.

Part 1 - Opening The Terminal

• To open the terminal in OSX
  • hold Command and press Space to open the spotlight search.
  • in the search bar, enter terminal
• To open the git-bash terminal in Windows OS
  • press the Windows key to open windows search.
  • in the search bar, enter git bash.

Part 2 - Displaying your Username

• Upon opening the terminal, verify what your username is.
  • execute whoami in the terminal.
  • The name of the account that is currently signed in should be displayed in the terminal’s standard output.
• In the examples below, the name of the user-account is hunte

Part 3 - Home Directory

• To navigate to the home directory execute cd ~ in the terminal
  • cd is a command used to change directories
  • ~ is an alias recognized by the shell to reference the home directory
• Verify that you are in your home directory by executing pwd to print working directory.
  • The file path pointing to a directory with your username should be displayed in the terminal’s standard output.

Part 4 - Listing Files in the Current Directory

• To list all of the files in the current directory, execute ls

Part 5 - Opening the File Explorer

• To get a graphical representation of the file system, open the file explorer.
  • execute explorer . from the Windows git-bash terminal
  • execute open . from the OSX terminal

Part 6 - Creating an Application-Development directory

• To create a new directory, named dev, execute mkdir dev from the home-directory.
  • mkdir is a command used to create a new directory
  • dev is the name of the directory to be created
• Verify that newly created directory is visible in the terminal, by executing ls.
  • The name of the directory, dev, should be displayed in the standard output.
• Verify that newly created directory is visible in the project explorer, by executing explorer . or open . respectively
  • The directory should be displayed as a folder in the project explorer

Part 7 - Change Directory to the dev directory

• To change the current working directory to dev, execute cd dev from the home directory.
• Verify that the command has executed properly by executing pwd to display the current working directory.
  • The name of the current working directory, ~/dev, should be displayed in the standard output.
• Verify that this directory is empty by executing ls
  • The standard output should not display anything

Section B - Creating A New Project Directory in dev directory

• The purpose of the following section is to re-familiarize with the aforementioned skills by creating a directory which contains files and other directories.

Part 1 - Opening The Terminal

• To open the terminal in OSX
  • hold Command and press Space to open the spotlight search.
  • in the search bar, enter terminal
• To open the git-bash terminal in Windows OS
  • press the Windows key to open windows search.
  • in the search bar, enter git bash.

Part 2 - Change Directory to the dev directory

• Execute cd ~/dev to change the current working directory to dev
• cd ~/dev can be read verbally as “change directory to home. From here navigate to directory named dev”
  • cd is a command used to change directories
  • ~ is an alias recognized by the shell to reference the home directory
  • / is a symbol used to express navigate to
• Execute pwd to display the current working directory to verify that the command has executed properly.
• Execute ls to verify the contents of this directory.

Part 3 - Create a New Project Directory

• Execute mkdir my-first-project from the dev directory to create a new directory named my-first-project in the dev directory
• Execute ls to verify that the directory has been created properly.
• Execute cd ./my-first-project to change the current working directory to the newly created directory.
• cd ./my-first-project can be read verbally as “change directory to current working directory. From here, navigate to directory named my-first-project”
  • cd is a command used to change directories
  • . is an alias recognized by the shell to reference the current working directory
  • / is a symbol used to express “from here, navigate to”
• Execute pwd to verify that you have navigated to the directory properly.

Part 4 - Create Directory Named empty-directory

• Execute mkdir empty-directory from the my-first-project directory to create a new directory, named empty-directory
• Execute ls to verify that the newly created directory, named empty-directory, has been created in the my-first-project directory.
• Execute cd ./empty-directory to change the current working directory to the newly created directory
• Execute pwd to verify that you have navigated to the directory properly.
• Execute ls to verify that this directory is empty.

Part 5 - Navigate Back to my-first-project directory

• Execute cd .. to navigate to the parent directory of the current working directory.
  • .. is an alias recognized by the shell to reference the parent directory.
  • A parent directory is a directory which contains another directory.
    • (for example, my-first-project is a child directory of the parent directory named dev)
• Execute pwd to verify that you have navigated to the directory properly.
• Execute ls to verify this directory contains a directory named empty-directory.

Part 7 - Create Directory Named non-empty-directory

• Execute mkdir non-empty-directory from the my-first-project directory to create a new directory named non-empty-directory.
• Execute ls to verify that the newly created directory, named non-empty directory has been created in the directory named my-first-project.
• Execute cd ./non-empty-directory from the my-first-project directory to change the current working directory to non-empty-directory.
• Execute pwd to verify that you have navigated to the directory properly.

Part 8 - Create Directories Within non-empty-directory

• Execute mkdir child-directory-1 to create a new directory in the non-empty-directory
• Execute ls to verify that the newly created directory, named child-directory-1 has been created in directory named non-empty-directory.`
• Execute mkdir child-directory-2 to create a new directory in the non-empty-directory
• Execute ls to verify that the newly created directory, named child-directory-2 has been created in directory named non-empty-directory.`

Part 9 - Create Files Within non-empty-directory

• Execute touch some-file to create a new file in the non-empty-directory
• Execute touch some-text-file.txt to create a new text file in the non-empty-directory
• Execute touch some-webpage-file.html to create a new webpage file in the non-empty-directory
• Execute touch some-mp3-file.mp3 to create a new mp3 file in the non-empty-directory

• Execute ls to verify that each of the child-resources are displayed

    child-directory-1
    child-directory-2
    some-file
    some-mp3-file.mp3
    some-text-file.txt
    some-webpage-file.html
  

Part 10 - Open File in nano editor

• Execute nano some-text-file.txt to open the file named some-text-file.txt in the nano-editor.
• Enter your name in the nano editor.
• From the keyboard, hold Ctrl and press X to exit the editor
• From the keyboard, press Y, when prompted to Save modified buffer.
• From the keyboard, press Enter, when prompted to Save File Name.
• Execute cat some-text-file.txt to verify that the contents entered in the nano editor have been saved in the some-text-file.txt file.

Part 11 - Navigate Back to my-first-project directory

• Execute cd .. to change to the parent directory of the current working directory.
  • .. is an alias recognized by the shell to reference the parent directory.
  • A parent directory is the directory which contains another directory.
    • (for example, non-empty-directory is a child directory _ of the _parent directory named my-first-project)
• Execute pwd to verify that you have navigated to the directory properly.
• Execute ls to verify this directory contains a directory named empty-directory and non-empty-directory.

Part 12 - Delete empty-directory

• Execute rmdir ./empty-directory to delete the empty directory
  • Note: - The rmdir command cannot delete a non-empty directory
• Execute ls to verify that this directory no longer contains a directory named empty-directory

Part 13 - Delete non-empty-directory

• Execute rmdir ./non-empty-directory to verify that a directory that is not empty cannot be deleted via the command rmdir.
• Execute ls to verify that the current working directory still contains a directory named non-empty-directory
• Execute rm -rf ./non-empty-directory to delete the the directory containing the content created in Part 9 and Part 10
• Execute ls to verify that this directory no longer contains a directory named non-empty-directory

Part 14 - Fetching Command History

• Execute history to display the list of all the commands that have been executed in this terminal instance.
• Execute history > submission.txt to pipe the output of the history command to a file named submission.txt
  • piping is a mechanism for injecting data from one place to another
• Execute cat submission.txt to verify that the submission.txt file contains the expected contents.