Installations and Introduction to your Terminal

Installations and Introduction to your Terminal#

OBJECTIVES

Navigate files and directories using your terminal
Create, alter, and delete files using your terminal
Display basic information about files using bash commands
Use loops to execute programs from the terminal and store output

REQUIREMENTS

Jupyter notebooks and Jupyter Lab for use locally: Anaconda
VS Code Text Editor: VSCode
Terminal application with git installed. For windows users, the easiest approach is to download and install git for windows.

Navigating your file system#

Download and unzip the data for this lesson here: shell-lesson-data
Create a new directory on your desktop named shell-lesson-data.

Basic Filesystem#

The filesystem looks like an upside down tree. The topmost directory is the root directory that holds everything else. We refer to it using a slash character, /, on its own; this character is the leading slash in /Users/nelle.

The user imhotep’s files are stored in /Users/imhotep, user larry’s in /Users/larry, and Nelle’s in /Users/nelle. Nelle is the user in our examples here; therefore, we get /Users/nelle as our home directory. Typically, when you open a new command prompt, you will be in your home directory to start.

Using the Terminal#

In this exercise, our focus will be on using the terminal to navigate files and directories as well as to create and destroy files and directories.

Navigating Files#

Use pwd to see where you currently are located

Use ls to see the files and folders available

Use ls -F to differentiate between files and folders

Use cd to change directory

Use mkdir to make a new directory

Use touch to create a new .txt file

Use rm VERY CAREFULLY to delete the file

Use rm VERY CAREFULLY to examine the contents of a directory and delete one by one

Challenge#

Starting from /Users/nelle/data, which of the following commands could Nelle use to navigate to her home directory, which is /Users/nelle?

cd .
cd /
cd /home/nelle
cd ../..
cd ~
cd home
cd ~/data/..
cd
cd ..

Using the filesystem diagram below, if pwd displays /Users/thing, what will ls -F ../backup display?

../backup: No such file or directory
2012-12-01 2013-01-08 2013-01-27
2012-12-01/ 2013-01-08/ 2013-01-27/
original/ pnas_final/ pnas_sub/

Using the filesystem diagram above, if pwd displays /Users/backup, and -r tells ls to display things in reverse order, what command(s) will result in the following output:

pnas_sub/ pnas_final/ original/

ls pwd
ls -r -F
ls -r -F /Users/backup