Mac Terminal from Scratch: Command Line for Beginners

Learn to copy, move, rename, and remove files and directories in Mac Terminal using cp, mv, and rm, with prompts and recursive options.

Learn to use the find and locate commands to search for files and directories by name, user, group, permissions, size, and type, then execute actions on matches or redirect results.

Explore the find command to locate and manage files by permissions, type, name, and ownership, including deleting, changing permissions, and identifying empty or hidden files and directories.

Learn to use the mac terminal find command to locate files by modification time (-mtime), access time (-atime), and size (-size), with examples for last hour, seven days back.

Install the locate command on Red Hat Linux, update its database regularly, and use locate for fast, case-insensitive file searches with wildcards and optional limits.

Explore file permissions in mac terminal, viewing details with ls -l to understand owner, group, and others rights, learn how r, w, x chmod control access for files and directories.

Create directories and files, set and review permissions with chmod using numeric and recursive options, and manage ownership and group with chown and chgrp.

Discover how to gain administrative privileges with sudo, switch to the root user via sudoers configuration, manage password prompts, and delegate root access through the admin group.

Learn to search words and phrases in files with grep, identify matching lines, and count occurrences using wc. Explore piping to more for convenient viewing and file content analysis.

Type input from the keyboard and redirect it to a file using the greater-than sign, then read or append with cat, and optionally concatenate multiple files into one.

Learn to chain commands with pipes by connecting the output of the who command to sort and count logged in users with who | wc -l.

Learn what a process is, how parent and child relationships work, and how the system manages resources with pid and demons. Use ps and top to view processes.

Explore processes and jobs in the Linux shell, including foreground and background execution, suspending with Ctrl-Z, resuming with fg or bg, viewing jobs, and terminating with kill using job numbers.

Master the Linux top command to monitor all running processes, CPU and memory usage, load averages, and tasks, while customizing the display, filtering by user, and adjusting the refresh rate.

Explore the Mac terminal to list processes by name, user, or group, and learn the five states—running, sleeping, waiting, stopped, zombie—and what drives transitions.

Chain commands in the Mac terminal by running background jobs with &, executing sequential tasks with ;, and using conditional operators &&, ||, and !.

Learn to use sed and awk to search, replace, and extract data from files, including first field extraction from lines like passwd files, and view results with cat.

Explore practical sed and awk techniques to view specific line ranges, perform case-insensitive replacements, normalize spaces, and insert blank lines, using pipelines and file comparisons.

Understand how bash history stores and recalls commands, including startup and initialization files, and learn to view, search, edit, and reuse past commands with history, exclamation marks, and fc.

Learn to view and print current aliases with the alias command, create session aliases like la='ls -la', and persist them by adding definitions to ~/.bashrc.

Explore Vim editor basics in the Mac terminal, switching between insert and command modes, typing text, navigating with h j k l, and saving files with write commands.

Learn to access help in the Mac terminal by typing help and selecting topics. Use the tab key for auto-suggested topics and exit back to your prompt when finished.

Practice a hands-on exercise to create a new file named text 1, enter insert mode with i, type text, press escape, and save and quit with the double q command.

Master vim navigation and editing in the mac terminal, using h j k l, 0 and $, and word moves with w and b, insert, change, delete, and yank commands.

Master vim navigation and screen control in the mac terminal, using commands for scrolling, jumping to lines, moving by characters, words, sentences, and searching seamlessly.

Learn vim usage on the Mac terminal to open files at a line, enter read-only mode, and save or recover edits using w, q, wq, x, and exclamation overrides.

Learn to edit with vim across windows using horizontal and vertical splits, manage buffers for files, and enable status lines with set laststatus=2; practice opening files with vim -o.

Learn to open two files at once and move between them by enabling the mouse option in vim; use keyboard navigation or ctrl-w to switch between windows.