What is the Command Line?

The command line is a text based interface for interacting with the files on your computer. Just like the Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder are gui's (Graphical User Interface) for interacting with your computer files.

You can create, delete and edit all files and folders (and more) from the command line, just like you can with the gui explorers.

Text Based Terminal

GUI

You may here the terms hear other terms being used to reference the command line, such as terminal, bash or shell. This tutorial will use command line and terminal interchangeably.