What is the Command Line?


As described in the previous section, the concepts of the terminal, a terminal-emulator, the shell, etc have all become interchangeable with the "command-line" in many contexts.

The command line is the text interface to your computer, named after (well...) the line on the screen where the user can execute commands.

To demonstrate, let's see how to execute the ubiquitous "hello world!" example:

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ninja$: echo Hello World!
Hello·World!
ninja$:  

In this example, we executed the echo command to pass the string "Hello World!" to stdout.

More broadly, the command-line is the central component of the Command-line Interface (CLI) that creates the user interface in many terminal applications.

Next, let's take a look at some of the more common commands.