Datasheet

Book VIII

Chapter 1

. . . And UNIX Lurks

Beneath

677

Uncovering the Terminal

The best way to find out how to use the command line is to jump right in.

Mac OS X comes stocked with an application named Terminal. As I men-

tioned earlier, the Terminal application is where you enter commands in the

command line, and it’s located in the Utilities folder within the Applications

folder on your hard drive — choose Applications➪Utilities (from the key-

board, press Shift+Ô+U).

Double-click the icon, as shown in Figure 1-1, to launch Terminal.

Figure 1-1:

Find the

Terminal

application

in your

Utilities

folder.

By the way, feel free to make Terminal more accessible by dragging its icon

to the Dock or the toolbar. That way, you won’t have to dive this deep into

the Applications folder in the future.

What’s a prompt?

Upon launch of the Terminal application, you’ll immediately notice some

text in the window that appears on-screen:

Last login: Sun Jun 23 17:51:14 on console

WHITEDRAGON:~ markchambers$

55_9781118022061-bk08ch01.indd 67755_9781118022061-bk08ch01.indd 677 8/10/11 9:39 AM8/10/11 9:39 AM