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The working area of the Terminal window will initially contain just a few lines of text. Once launched, Terminal will display a window containing a title listing the current working directory, usually your home folder, the type of shell in use, such as Bash, and the window size in characters, such as 80×24 (80 characters across and 24 characters or lines down). You can launch Terminal just like any other Mac app. The Terminal app is located at /Applications/Utilities. So, let’s get started with how to launch and configure Terminal for your use. We’ll also look at some basic file system manipulation as examples of ways to use Terminal. In the first part of our introduction to Terminal, we’re going to look at Terminal with an eye to more basic usage, primarily as a way to modify the standard behavior of the Mac OS. If you’re interested in creating shell scripts, Apple provides a developer’s guide to scripting using Terminal and the various UNIX shells.

The entire syntax that the Bash shell understands is a bit beyond this article. It’s not just simple text commands you enter, such as displaying the contents of a folder, that the Bash shell can process, but also scripts, chains of commands, piping, conditional testing, variables, and more. The UNIX shell, in this case, a Bash shell, provides a command processor that can interpret text entered by the user.

The Mac’s Terminal app emulates the old terminals, and provides access to a UNIX shell, where you can issue commands to manipulate the UNIX system that underlies the Mac OS. (The default Terminal window, with black text on a white background.) At first glance, Terminal seems to be the antithesis of the Mac’s friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface), presenting instead a simple command line interface that harkens back to the days of glowing CRTs with green, amber, or whitish text, connected to some distant computer system. Terminal may be one of the least used but most powerful apps included with a Mac.