In the Banno group, you’ll find a few tasks you can’t complete without access to the terminal. If you already know how to use a terminal, you’re good to go! You know more than we’re gonna cover here. But if you have no idea what the terminal is, we’ve got ya covered.

Seriously, what is the terminal?

The terminal, or command line, allows you to use text commands to interact with your computer. To open the terminal, simply open the spotlight search (cmd + spacebar) and enter terminal.

Basic commands

For the most part, you’ll use the terminal to traverse through your computer’s folder structure and interact with text files. By default, you’ll start at your user folder, named the same as your Mac username. For the most part, you’ll use the following commands:

cd | The cd command moves you to a new folder. Simply enter cd followed by the folder path to move to the folder you’ve chosen. Your home folder is located at ~/, and the root directory of your computer is simply /. For example, if you’d like to navigate to a folder called banno in your home folder, you’d simply enter cd ~/banno. ls | The ls commands lists all files and folders in your current location. mkdir | The mkdir command creates a folder in your current location. For example, entering mkdir banno would make a folder named banno in your current location. touch | The touch command checks to see if a given file exists and creates it if it does not. For example, if you wanted to create a new file called file.txt you’d enter touch file.txt. This is useful when you need a file but aren’t sure if it exists.