Open up Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal
List out the files and directories on where you are by typing:
ls
To see where you are on your machine, type:
pwd
Let's try making a directory. To do that, type:
mkdir newdirectory
This will create a directory called newdirectory - it's the parameter that follows the command. For example, if you want to create a directory called mango, you would type:
mkdir mango
To navigate to the directory, you can use the cd command - change directory. So:
cd newdirectory
Note that there's a few navigation shortcuts. For example the ~ prefix puts you in your home directory. So to go to your Desktop, type:
cd ~Desktop
ls
Once again, ls lists out the files and directories of where you're in. To create a new empty file called apple, simply type:
touch apple
To see if you actually made it, you can type:
ls
To create copies of directories and files, we can use the cp command. For example, to make a copy of apple called banana, we can simply type:
cp apple banana
ls
Now, you're not going to want to copy files all the time - sometimes you're going to need to move them or rename them. To rename apple to pineapple, simply type:
mv apple pineapple
Note that commands work across directories. For example, to make a directory called fruitbasket and put all the files inside that directory, simply type:
mkdir fruitbasket
mv pineapple banana fruitbasket/
ls fruitbasket/
You can go to the very "top" of your machine's directories by typing:
cd /
To list out the top-level directories, simply use ls again. You should see something similar to this:
Applications
Library
Network
System
Users
Volumes
bin
cores
dev
etc
home
macOS_SDK
net
opt
private
sbin
tmp
usr
var
It's a lot, but don't worry. There's only a couple of directories that we care about - these ones:
bin
etc
home
sbin
tmp
usr
var
To briefly list it out:
/bin/ contains the essential commands that we have in the system. All the commands we were typing earlier exist there.
/etc/ contains system configuration. If you need to change something in your system, you're likely to go here.
/sbin/ contains your system binaries. This is like /bin/, except a lot of the commands are Administrator-only.
/tmp/ is for temporary files.
/usr/ is where user-land data and binaries exist.
/var/ is for variable data, or things that change a lot. This is where your logs and spool files will be in.
To list out the contents of each directory, simply type:
ls /bin/
Create a file called test.txt in your Desktop using TextEdit or similar. How would you:
1.) Create a directory called /tmp/test/
2.) Move the test.txt file inside the directory?
3.) Go to that directory?