To 'close' a folder, you change out of that location. The command to use is cd plus the location you want to change to: cd Downloads It becomes your current location.įor example, say you want open your Downloads folder. The end result is the same: once you change to a folder, you are 'in' that folder. Instead of opening a folder, you change to a location. In a terminal, the thought process is slightly different. Once it's open, that folder usually dominates the window. In a graphical file manager, you open a folder by double-clicking on it. Once you have your terminal application open, you can get a view of your file system using the command ls. For this article to be useful on Windows, you can install Cygwin which provides a POSIX environment. Windows: PowerShell is the open source terminal application, but it uses a language and syntax all its own. Download iTerm2 to get a feature-rich, GPLv2 replacement. MacOS: The default terminal application isn't open source and is widely considered lacking in features. Regardless of the name, you can usually launch it from your application menu using the key word 'terminal.' Linux: Look for Console, Konsole, or Terminal. Your operating system might have a unique name for it, but generically it's usually known as a 'terminal' or 'console'. The mainframe-and-terminal model is now essentially emulated through an application. Today, everyone's got a computer on their desk or in their bag. The terminal is as relevant today as it was half a century ago, and in this article, I provide five common file management tasks you can do with nothing but the shell. Don't be fooled by this 'ancient' history. And historically, a terminal was a physical access point, consisting of a keyboard and a readout (a printer, long ago, and later a cathode ray tube), that provided convenient access to a mainframe. Traditionally, the shell is the place where the user and the OS could interface directly with one another. Welcome to the communityĪ terminal is an application that provides access to the user shell of an operating system (OS).

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