For visibility’s sake, I’m introducing this page with a task. As you read through this page, you’ll learn what the task means.
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🎒 Create a directory inside your home directory (or some directory within your home directory) called daily. For organization’s sake, I highly recommend keeping everything Daily related in this directory.
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Your computer is comprised of files and folders (i.e. directories). You are probably familiar with navigating your computer by using a graphical interface such as Finder on macOS or File Explorer on Windows. A terminal provides another avenue to navigate your computer with a text interface. On a macOS machine, open your terminal by searching for “Terminal” in Spotlight. If you are on a Windows machine, follow these instructions for setting up Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). By default, Windows comes with two terminals (the command prompt and PowerShell) but using WSL is generally preferred. You will likely see something like the following:
There are a few things to note here, particularly on the second line. This is called a prompt:
ericlau@Erics-MacBook-Air ~ %
We can break this prompt into a few parts. The user (ericlau) is using (@) the specified computer (Erics-MacBook-Air). The user is currently viewing the home directory (~).
The home directory is considered the “main” directory on your computer. Because it is the “main” directory, it uses the ~ symbol as a shorthand.
The longhand name of the home directory looks like /Users/ericlau. As is implied by the slashes, the home directory (ericlau) is located inside the Users directory.
The % symbol indicates that the line is a prompt — you can use your keyboard to type anything into the terminal next to the prompt. Pressing enter or return will execute whatever you type into the terminal.
To orient ourselves, consider the graphical Finder interface view of the same home directory we’re talking about.
Listing a directory
Note that in the graphical interface, we are able to see all of the folders and files inside of the home directory. We can achieve the same in the terminal by using the ls command. Type ls into the terminal and then click enter or return on your keyboard. You’ll notice some text output. At the bottom, you see the usual prompt that allows you to enter another command.
There are various options (or flags) that you can use along with ls to modify the list output. I like to use ls -hal which outputs a human-formatted (h) list (l) of all (a) items in the current directory, including files that are typically hidden in graphical interfaces (like files whose names begin with a dot, aptly categorized as dotfiles). It will also include information on how many bytes a folder or file occupies, the time when it was last modified, who has permissions to interact with the file, who owns the file, etc.