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Getting started with Linux
The Mac operating system is a Unix-based on graphical user interface. You can therefore interact with your Mac computer using many (most) of the same commands used in Unix/Linux systems. Many of these commands achieve the same things that you can achieve using 'point and click' methods. For instance, if you wanted to create a new folder on your Mac desktop you could click on your desktop, select File
> New Folder
. But you can also create a new folder using Unix commands in Mac's Terminal.app
(which can be found in Applications/Utilities/Terminal
). This will open a “command line” interface (meaning that you interact with the computer by typing out commands rather than pointing and clicking with your mouse/trackpad). By typing the following commands (press enter/return after each line) you will change the directory of your command-line interface to your desktop and create a new folder entitled “mynewfolder”
cd ~/Desktop mkdir mynewfolder