[mattlondon]

Command line is the black and white (usually) "hacker view" that you see in movies. All OSs have one easily accessible (even windows).

Think of it as a text-only way of moving around and looking at directories/folders inside your computer - you start off in some directory and can move to other ones. In side each directory you can do really basic things like just list the files there, or rename them or move them etc. Just like you can in the GUI.

Where the command line gets powerful is that as well as manipulating files you can run arbitrary "commands" - i.e. you can run programs like you can by double-clicking an icon - AND you can start to do smart stuff like sending the output of one command as the input to another.

So you can do things like sort all of the lines in a text file in alphabetical order, remove duplicates, then count the number of lines with the command line in a couple of seconds, where as in the GUI you'd probably end up pasting the text file into a spreadsheet or something I guess.

Look for "terminal" or "CMD" in Linux/osx or Windows and have a poke around by moving through directories and listing files etc, checking against the GUI as you go. Eventually you'll get an intuition for using it.

Good luck!

[taurusnoises]

Thanks so much. I've been thinking that Terminal on my Mac was gonna play a role in all this learning somehow. Maybe my next step will be to find some tutorials on how it works and for what purpose. Thanks for the Kickstart.

[mattlondon]

https://ashleynolan.co.uk/blog/getting-started-with-terminal has some very basic stuff for mac terminal (n.b. these are also largely identical to linux too, so bonus!). No relation to the site, just found it from googling and looks to cover off the essentials.

That will get you started getting comfortable moving around and doing things, but it doesn't go further than the absolute minimum. It will at least get you started and hopefully slightly comfortable if you need to use the terminal for anything else in the future as that is where the real learning comes from. E.g. following a tutorial and they say "type this in the command line" you are now at least a little familiar with it and can google the rest.

Have fun.

[taurusnoises]

Thanks so much! Fun project for later today. Really appreciate you taking the time to help a noob.