# The command line You may not have worked with the command line before, but if you continue in computational research, it's destined to be something you spend a lot of time with. And probably - something you'll eventually enjoy using! ## Getting started on the command line ### Using the command line on a Mac On a Mac, you have very few steps before you're up and running on the command line! All you need to do is to open up `Terminal`. This is a program on MacOS that communicates directly with the computer, so that you can send commands and run programs.
vim
by creating a document called test.txt
in your current working directory. Type a sentence in the document, then close it out.ls
after editing the document, what do you see? What about with the -l
flag?
--help
on Linux, which shows you all of the flags that are available for a command.cp
command requires that you give it two pieces of information, every time you run the command. It needs what you want to copy and where you want to copy it to. If you leave these details out, you'll get an error. The arguments to a command are separated ("delimited") by spaces.