Developing via command line is a love-hate thing for us as developers. And a bit of a holy war. And it contains other holy wars inside, such as vi vs. emacs. But I digress. Regardless of your reason to develop via command line, UNIX is likely where we’ll do it.
A few definitions
- Shell: Your command prompt. A shell is technically a command language interpreter.
- BASH (or bash): One of the most common shells in UNIX.
- ~: Your home directory.
- vi and emacs: Two of the most common text editors. You’ll also hear vim, which is effectively a superset of the vi editor.
- ~/.bashrc: Text file that stores user-specific settings for the bash shell. Stored in your home directory.
- ~/.vimrc: Text file that stores user-specific settings for, you guess it, vi and vim. Stored in your home directory.
- SSH Client: Application that allows you to log onto a remote machine and execute commands (and a lot of other stuff that’s not important right now). Runs the protocol SSH (“Secure Shell”).
- PuTTY: One of the most common SSH clients.(http://www.putty.org/)
- mRemoteNg: Another SSH client that I personally like far more than PuTTY. (http://www.mremoteng.org/)
Let’s start with the most common UNIX commands
UNIX is all about learning the commands; and there are a lot of them. Try not to get overwhelmed or worry about understanding every command you see. Pull up your UNIX shell and let’s get rolling on a few.
- pwd: “Print Working Directory”. What folder are you in?
- cd: “Change Directory”. cd MyFolder
- cd ..: Move up one folder. Use “..” as another name for “the parent folder”.
- mkdir: “Make Directory”. mkdir SomeNewFolder
- rm: “Remove”. Delete a file or directory.
- cp: “Copy”. cp sourceFile targetFile
