The command line is a text interface for the computer’s operating system. To access the command line, we use the terminal.

On Mac & Linux systems, we access the command line through something called Bash.

The following are some of the commonly used commands in Unix based systems such as Linux & Mac OS X to navigate through the file system:

Command	Meaning
pwd	Outputs the name of the current working directory
ls	Lists all files and directories in the working directory
ls-a	Lists all contents inclusing hidden files & directories
ls-l	Lists all contents of a directory in long format, as well as the file permissions
ls-t	Orders files and directories by the time they were last modified
ls -alt	Lists all contents, including hidden files and directories, in long format, ordered by the date and time they were last modified.
cd	Switches you into the directory you specify
mkdir	Creates a new directory in the working directory
touch	Creates a new file inside the working directory
clear	Clears the terminal
cat	Outputs the contents of a specified file (cat container.txt)

Copy

Command	Meaning
cp source.txt destination.txt	Copy the contents of a source file into a destination file
cp source.txt destination/	Copy a file to a destination directory
cp file1.txt file2.txt my_directory	Copy the files file1.txt & file2.txt into the same directory
cp * my_directory	Copy all files in the current working directory into another directory
cp w*.txt my_directory	Selects all files in the working directory starting with "w" (prefix) and ending with "txt" (suffix), and copies them to my_directory

Move

Command	Meaning
mv my_file.txt my_directory/	Move my_file.txt into my_directory/
mv file1.txt file2.txt my_directory/	Move file1.txt & file2.txt into my_directory/

Rename a file

Command	Meaning
mv file_origin.txt file_renamed.txt	Rename the file as file_renamed.txt

Delete

Command	Meaning
rm unwanted_file.txt	Delete the file unwanted_file.txt from the filesystem
rm -r unwanted_directory	Delete a directory & all of its child directories