How to Use Terminal on Your Mac – The Mac Observer

For power users or aspiring power users, the command line is an essential tool. It allows you to interact directly with your computer’s operating system, without being hindered by the constraints of a graphical interface. On your Mac, you access the command line through Terminal. For those of you unfamiliar with this powerful tool, let me give you an introduction. Those who are already somewhat familiar can also get a good refresher.

What is Terminal on macOS?

Beneath the gorgeous graphical interface of macOS, you will find a variant of Unix. More precisely, it is based on BSD. Before color graphics, icons, and pointing devices, the command line was all we had. To date, you’ll find some of the most powerful command-line utilities for your Mac in Terminal.

As you begin your journey to learn Terminal, a word of caution. I won’t say “Here come dragons”, but powerful commands here should be treated with respect and executed with care. You could accidentally delete important files, force quit essential services, or shut down your Mac unexpectedly.

How to Access and Use Terminal on Your Mac

That said, getting to the Terminal is easy. There are several ways to find it. Maybe the fastest is throwing Projector by pressing Command spacewhile typing Terminal and squeeze Feedback. Alternatively, you can click Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

In Terminal, you can issue a lot of commands to navigate your file system, run programs, and more. There’s even a command that lets you download files from the web using Terminal.

By default, Terminal will open a window with black text on a white background. If it’s too jarring for your eyes, well that’s easy to fix. Click Shell in the menu bar, New window then the profile you prefer.

When you want to run a command in Terminal, just type it in and press Feedback. Almost every order will include three basic items:

• The command itself.
• An argument that tells the command what and where it should work.
• A modifier option that affects the output of the command.

The argument and modifier are often optional, but let’s look at an example. Suppose you want to list the files in your Documents folder. You will use the ls command to do it, like this:

ls ~/Documents

And there you have it, a simple list of files in your Documents folder. Now, what if you want more information about this list, such as file sizes? This is where the edit options come in.

ls -la ~/Documents

In this case, the -there modifier says to list all files (A) in long form (I), which gives more details about each file.

Commonly Used Terminal Commands

In the Terminal, there are a few commands that will be your bread and butter. These are:

• CD: Allows you to move from one directory to another.
• PC: Used to copy files.
• rm: Used to delete files.
• mv: Used to move files.
• find: think of this as Spotlight for the command line, but much more popular. It supports the use of regular expressions (regex) in your searches.
• of: disk usage, a command to tell you how much of your Mac’s disk is in use.
• sudo: the so-called “god” command, used to give the following command administrator rights.

The best way to learn Terminal is to do it, but first you need to get familiar with these basic commands. Each has its own manual, which you can find by typing male . SO, man find will tell you everything you need to know about find order.

Tricks of the trade for the command line

Keep in mind that your mouse might not seem useful to you in Terminal. That doesn’t mean you can’t drag, drop, copy, or paste into or from Terminal. You certainly can. In fact, let’s say you want to move to a directory deep within your filesystem.

To drag and drop file or directory names in Terminal, just follow this walkthrough.

1. Using Searcherpoint and click to navigate to the directory or file you want to work with.
2. Click in Terminal, and start typing the command you want to use on that file or folder. For example, let’s say I want to move to the Documents directory on my iCloud Drive. I’ll start typing CD (including space).
3. Then click on the folder in Searcher and start dragging it.
4. Drag the folder into Terminal and release your mouse button.
5. The full path to this folder falls into Terminal, at the end of my CD order.
6. Press Feedbackand you will go to this directory.

You can also copy and paste other apps directly into Terminal, if needed. Want to run another app from Terminal? You can do that too. Suppose you want to run the macOS TextEdit application.

• Type open -a TextEdit.app.
• Press Feedback.

This can be very useful if you want to develop automations or scripts in Terminal.

Learn more about using Terminal on your Mac.

There’s a lot more you can do in Terminal than I could cover here (without risking putting you to sleep). You should explore the various man pages for Terminal commands.

You will also benefit from the Apple section in the macOS user manual on Terminal. Be sure to bookmark it, as it is full of useful information. Also check back here as we continue to develop our tutorials on using Terminal on macOS.