Appendix F — Bash commands

These are some common commands used in bash.

To do this	Mac	Windows	Notes
print working directory	pwd	pwd
change directory	cd	cd
list directory	ls	ls
make directory	mkdir	mkdir
remove file	rm	rm	1
remove directory	rmdir		2
copy file or directory	cp	cp
move or rename file	mv	mv
page through a file	less	more
print a file	cat	type
find files	find	dir -r
find things inside files	grep	select-string
read the manual	man	help
exit your shell	exit	exit
become a super user	sudo	runas	3

rm works for both files and folders in windows.
rmdir works in Git Bash, but not in other Windows terminal programs.
You best know what you are doing before running as sudo or root.

F.1 man

If you are unsure about how any of these terminal commands work, there are manual pages for each one already on your computer. Now, I’m not saying they are extremely well-written and intuitive, but they are there.

$ man cd

Will open the manual page for cd and tell you have to change directory.

But man pages, as they are called, are a special program themselves, and have a different commands to negotiate around them, as you’ll discover quickly if you try to scroll to see more.

hit f or space to advance one page through the file
hit j to go down one line
hit k to go up one line
hit g to go the the top
hit q to quit

Moving around the man pages is frustrating at first. There are online versions of these, but the man command doesn’t need the internet. These files are already on your computer.

Man pages are useful to figure out the options or flags for commands, so you can learn that ls -lt will give you that long list sorted in order of time, most-recently modified at top.

F.2 -h for help

Sometimes there isn’t a man page for a command, but there is help file. If we wanted to look at a list of all the flags for the curl program, we would can get “help with the -h flag. I would type:

$ curl -h

This gives you a list of the flags and arguments for that command, along with other information.