Starting a terminal
A terminal window is how you can access the command line. To get started you need to open one!
If you are not sure how to do this, see the instruction page for setting up a UNIX terminal
When you open a terminal window, you will see the command prompt. It will probably look a bit like this:
<username>@<computer name> ~ % ▮
...that is, it shows your username, the name of the computer you're using, and also the path to the directory you are
currently in (which will start off as ~, meaning you are in your home directory.) The prompt line will end with a % (or
sometimes $) character, to indicate the prompt itself.
This command-line prompt can in fact look a bit different depending on where you are running from. In this tutorial we will generally just write a percent sign
%
to indicate the prompt.
To check things are working, let's try out a simple command - type echo "Hello, $USER!"into the terminal and press Enter. You should see something like:
% echo "Hello, $USER!"
Hello, gav!
If this is your first UNIX command - congratulations!
Remember that in the above, the % indicates the command prompt. You don't type the % but just type the command and then press <Enter> to make it run.
Once you have this working, move on to the command-line basics on the next page.