macOS Terminal - Command Line Window

Mac Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟macOS Terminal - Command Line Window

This section provides an introduction to macOS Terminal, which provides you a command line window to interact with the operating system.

What is macOS Terminal? macOS Terminal is a system tool that allows to interact with the operating system by typing in text commands. macOS Terminal is also called command line window.

macOS Terminal actually runs the "bash (Bourne-again shell)" program, which takes commands from the keyboard, executes them and display output to the Terminal window.

One way to start an instance of macOS Terminal is to click "Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal".

Once the Terminal window is started, you can type in any commands to manage files or run other tools or applications on the system. Below is a sample session of macOS Terminal commands and output:

herong$ pwd
  /Users/herong

herong$ ls
  Desktop    Downloads  Movies    Pictures
  Documents  Library    Music    Public

herong$ ps
  PID TTY           TIME CMD
  934 ttys000    0:00.77 -bash

herong$ ping google.com
  PING google.com (172.217.3.110): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from 172.217.3.110: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=47.651 ms
  64 bytes from 172.217.3.110: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=36.947 ms
  64 bytes from 172.217.3.110: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=39.123 ms
  ...
  Ctrl-c