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Field Guide

Open the Terminal

Now we need to get our hands dirty and start playing with the Terminal. This will be a very quick tour, but will help get you started. We will expand on this in the next chapter.

Open the terminal on your computer.

At this point, you should see a “prompt” within the terminal. This is the shell asking you to give it an instruction. You type commands, and press the Enter or Return key on your keyboard to get the shell to do what you have asked.

Try the following:

Terminal window
echo "Hello `whoami`"

Now let’s have a look at the basic commands you will need to use… these will be enough to get you started and you can learn more as you go.