Command line basics, Windows edition
With all the fancy folder and file icons in the Windows Explorer (the Windows equivalent of the Mac OS Finder) and various file open and file save dialog boxes, there’s not much need for the command line on the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Certainly not for the typical user, who just needs to check e-mail and work on Microsoft Office documents. Software developers, on the other hand, can’t dodge the command line as much.
Sooner or later, a computer programmer runs into a problem, looks something up on Stack Overflow or something like that, and finds that all the suggested solutions involve typing things on the command line.
Especially with Git, despite the availability of Git tools with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The command line remains the most familiar way to interact with Git, and a well-chosen command is preferable to hunting through menus and dialog boxes in a GUI.
In this article, I will try to explain the basics of going up and down folders using the command line, and I’ll talk about Git just a tiny bit more.
Some of you might be too young to remember the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS). To perform tasks like copying a file from the hard drive to a floppy disk it was necessary to type a “copy” on the command line, the name of the file to be copied…