Command Line

The command line is …

What a terminal might look like in Visual Studio Code. The line gives the file location followed by a >

Why Command Line?

The terminal is a powerful place to run more nuanced commands on your computer that a developer might need.

Many developer applications have CLIs, or Command Line Interfaces, that allow you to run the application through the terminal.

Some applications exclusively run through the terminal. Git is one example. This saves the application’s developer from needing to program a GUI, or Graphical User Interface, while still performing its normal functions. This also allows the application to run some relatively complicated tasks with minimal memory and high efficiency.

The command line can seem daunting at first, but just like language syntax, it just requires a bit of memory on your part. Most documentation will tell you exactly what commands you need to run and where to run them, so you don’t need to do very much memorizing at all.

Here are some sample commands with the Windows command line. You will not need most of these for development.

Commands to Know

When in doubt, look up the command. Some rarer commands have strange usage that is not intuitive at all.

cd SomeDirectory “change directory” This command changes the current directory to whatever “SomeDirectory” is given as by the user. This means any future commands will now run at the new system location.

ls “list” This command lists the files in the current directory.