I am a new mac user and I was curious about terminal. What is it, and what does It do. I have only had the mac for a short time, maybe a few months, and I wanted to learn as much as the mac as much as possible. Their is nothing and no one like apple. Everything fits together like sliced bread and I love it. I'm trying to learn voiceover as much as possible on the mac but theirs so much to learn.
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Hi Don,
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Michael Hansen
AppleVis Editorial Team
terminal
Hello,
So, the terminal is... basically a text only interface. kind of like what dos was back in the 1980s and 1990s. You would type a command, and it would do what you told it to do. but recontextualizing it in mac OS, the terminal is for those who need a specific set of tools, or just don't find the gui (graphical user interface) way of doing the same task efficient. for example, the terminal can do things, for basic stuff, like creating a folder, creating, renaming, copying, and deleting folders. but you can also install extra tools, like homebrew, to install more libraries or apps. this probably doesn't make a lot of sense. bottom line, though, if you don't know what the terminal is, don't use it. depending on thecommand a rogue space in the wrong place can turn a command from deleting one file and deleting everything on the disk. same thing with moving or wherever a * wildcard applies. again, don't use it unless instructed, and if you are instructed to use it, do exactly what it says.
Re: Don't use it.
I mean, learn what it is, if you want to use it. You can. For example:
https://support.apple.com/guide/terminal/welcome/mac
Terminal is, in essence, a form of Unix shell. So learning about Unix and its commands, e.g. shell scripting, less, and so on, would be another good place to start. It's true you can do a lot of damage with Terminal, but I mean, I can delete a whole disk in Finder, the graphical file manager, pretty easily, I'd imagine. I'm not going to try it to find out. But it's not like you should be scared of Terminal.
Just learn about the commands you might want to use before you go typing things, e.g. that you might find randomly on the internet. But really, this is true of everything. You should find out what a typical Mac program will do before running it, or something somebody tells you to do in System Settings or Finder or whatever.