Introduction to the Command Line

In this tutorial we're going to explore how to navigate your computer using the command line. Instead of pointing and clicking, we'll be typing in either git bash (Windows) or terminal (OSX) to tell the computer directly what task we'd like it to perform.

In this session, we will:

• learn common commands to create and display files (touch and echo)
• learn commands to create directories (mkdir)
• navigate our file structure using change directory (cd), print working directory (pwd), and list (ls)
• move content from one place to another using redirects (>) and pipes (|)
• explore a comma separated values (.csv) dataset using word and line counts, head and tail, and the concatenate command cat
• search text files using the grep command
• create and sort cheat sheets for the commands we learn

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Current editor: Alice McGrath Past editors: Roberto Vargas, Alicia Peaker Based on previous work by Patrick Smyth, Mary Catherine McKinniburgh, Jojo Karlin, and Kelsey Chatlosh.

Digital Research Institute (DRI) Curriculum by Graduate Center Digital Initiatives is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://github.com/DHRI-Curriculum. When sharing this material or derivative works, preserve this paragraph, changing only the title of the derivative work, or provide comparable attribution.