Open command line in mac

You, dear wonderful reader, know this because you read my previous post on Terminal-Finder Interaction. This can be used as a quick way to navigate to hidden directories. To clean up, you can option-click any close button in a Finder window to close all Finder windows.

In general you can think of open as the command line equivalent of double-clicking a file or folder in Finder. You can use this against multiple files as well:.

If you have changed the default application that handles a file type or want to override the default application, you can use the -a option:. You can specify just the name of an application or the full path, i. If you want to open a document but keep the application and the new document window in the background, use the -g option. In the default macOS config these are the same, but you can of course change the default app to your favourite text editor. The -n option will actually open a new sometimes second instance of the application and the command line tool will resume when you quit this new instance.

This a somewhat awkward workflow for Mac users. Many text editors provide a command line tool that may work better in these cases. If you are working on a file in Terminal and want to locate it in Finder, open can do better than just opening the enclosing folder. It can select a given file as well:. Note that the super user is not necessarily bad: Lets start by using ls to look around your computer.

1. How to use Terminal on Mac: Basic commands and functions.
2. Introduction to the Mac OS X Command Line - Treehouse Blog.
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Try typing ls into the command line and pressing enter. The computer will reply with a list of names. These names are the names of files and folders in the directory you are currently in. Whenever you open up a new command line, you start in your home directory, which is the directory that generally contains all of your files. Well, that's nice. But what if we want to go someplace else? That's what cd is for. Try entering this command:. Remember, to press enter once you have finished typing. The computer will not reply, but you are now sitting in your Documents directory.

You can test this by running ls again: So where do we go from here? How do we know which of these names are folders that we can go into and which are files that we can't? For that, we need more information from the ls command. Let's give it the -F flag to tell us about files and folders. You will notice that this time, some of the names that the computer returns to you will have a slash after them.

These names are folders: You can always cd into a folder by running cd with the folder name as an argument, as long as you can see that folder with ls -F. When you're done looking in folders, it's time to go back up. But how? Luckily, every folder contains a hidden link back up. To see these hidden links, we will use the -a flag for ls to see all.

There are at least two hidden links in every folder. In fact, you can give the ls command multiple flags, like so:. If you run this command, you will notice that the.

To go back up a folder, you can always run:. Remember that if you ever get lost in the computer, you can run pwd to see where you are. Computer programmers are lazy.

Because they are lazy, they invented some techniques to do more with less work. Here are some of those techniques:. Whenever you need to type out a location in an argument for example, in the cd command , you don't have to type out the whole thing: Once you've typed three or four letters, press the tab key, and the command line will fill in the rest for you! For example, if you are in your home directory, and you type cd Desk and then press the tab key, the command line will automatically complete the command to read cd Desktop!

You can also use this if you find yourself mistyping folder names: The command line has a few shortcuts built in. For example, to see your previously typed command, just press the up button. You can do this to submit the same command multiple times, or to edit a command that you didn't type in quite right. Method 2. Click the Spotlight icon. Type terminal into the search box. Double-click Terminal. Method 3. Open Finder.

Click Applications. If you don't see "Applications" in the left panel, click Go at the top of the screen and select Applications. Click Utilities. You may have to scroll down to find it. Yes No. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 5. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 4. Press the Escape key on the keyboard twice, then press "y" when you're asked if you want to see all commands.

How to open the command line.

Not Helpful 3 Helpful Most Windows commands will work in OSX by simply pressing 'command' instead of 'control'. Not Helpful 13 Helpful Then, type "rm -rf org. Not Helpful 0 Helpful 1. You can use "rm -rf " to delete any file. Don't do this unless you know for sure that the file is no longer needed. Can sharing files through a network be done between a mac and a windows machine?