Learn to be a macOS Command Line Ninja

This lecture demonstrates a couple of ways to launch Terminal, and gives a quick tour around the UI it so you can get familiar with it. It also explains the shell command prompt.

This lecture introduces three basic commands that everyone should know when they start out using the command line. It does not go into any depth on them, just demonstrates them briefly.

This short lecture explains why, on the command line, the word “directory” is often used instead of “folder”.

In this fundamental lecture you’ll learn about the macOS File System, including the root, directories and files, and you’ll see how to list files in Terminal and how what you do in Terminal relates to what you can see in Finder. You’ll also discover a little bit about what’s in the root directory of your macOS.

Another fundamental lecture that teaches you about the very important concept of a path. You’ll learn why it’s called a path, and how to create one on the command line. You’ll learn about the current working directory and relative paths, and you’ll see how to use one. You’ll learn how to send paths to Terminal commands.

In this lecture you’ll learn how to navigate around the file system in Terminal, going down the directory tree and back up again. You’ll learn how to get home, and a couple of useful hints to make you more productive.

In this lecture you’ll the problems with relative paths, and you’ll learn how to solve this using absolute paths. You’ll also learn the pros and cons of each kind of path, and when to use which one.

This lecture gives some context about the problem of spaces in paths. It explains exactly why the problem exists, as well as two methods for fixing it, and for interested students it gives a little background on the history of the topic. After this lecture you’ll understand more about how the bash shell works under the hood.

Learn how to create an empty file in Terminal using the touch command.

Learn how to copy files in Terminal using the cp command. Learn the different forms of cp so you can copy single or multiple files.

Learn how to move and rename files and directories in Terminal using the mv command. You'll learn the different ways you can invoke mv depending on whether you want to rename or move single files or entire directories.

Learn how to delete files in Terminal using the rm command. You'll learn the important differences between deleting files on the command line and in Finder, and how the command line can permanently delete a lot of files very quickly, which is both useful and potentially hazardous.

Learn how to create and delete directories in Terminal using the mkdir, rmdir and rm commands.

Learn how to display the contents of a text file using the cat, head, tail and less commands. This lecture discusses the limitations of these commands with binary files.

This lecture demonstrates how to get file metadata and statistics using the wc, date, stat and ls -l commands.

This lecture shows some of the common options for editing files in Terminal, and demonstrates how to use nano for simple editing tasks. It also introduces the common alternatives, vi and vim.

This lecture explains the concept of wildcards and how they’re used. It demonstrates the use of single character and asterisk wildcards.

This lecture dives into more detail about how wildcards work “under the hood”. The purpose of this is to dispel any incorrect assumptions about how the shell handles wildcards. It also demonstrates a useful way of “previewing” wildcard matches.

This lecture explains what grep is, and demonstrates how it can be used to find basic text patterns in files. It shows some of the common options used with grep.

Introduction to the concept of Unix Standard I/O Streams: stdin, stdout and stderr. Demonstrates how to perform stdout, stdin and stderr redirects on the command line.

This lecture introduces the concept of Unix pipes. It demonstrates how pipes can be used to connect commands together: a very powerful technique used by Unix/Linux professionals.

This lecture explains how pipes can be used to create command line “filters”. It demonstrates how they can be used with the sort, cut and paste commands to create complex workflows for manipulating data on the command line.