Command Line Interfaces (CLI) Overview
A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This allows for a very basic user interface to set configurations, invoke executables and providing information to them as to what actions they are to perform on an operating system. For brevity, command-line interfaces are abbreviated here as CLI. Usually command-line interfaces are a textual component to an OS's shell.
Terminals are a common way to refer to CLIs and were once the preferred way of interacting with a computer. Today the word, terminal, often gets used when referring to a terminal emulator. Terminal emulators, are actually a software program that emulates hardware terminals of old. Now terminals are normally just applications that give a CLI to an operating system's shell. These typically come with command interpreters that provide a scripting language to automate tasks. Some common ones include BASH (Bourne Again Shell) and ZSH (Z shell). User input is typicall handled via a Computer Keyboard.
File Management
One of the most common ways to use a CLI is to both navigate and manage files. There are a few common commands that nearly always gets used to do this.
ls- List files in the current directory.cd- Change directory.mkdir- Make directory.rm- Remove file or directory.mv- Move file or directory.cp- Copy file or directory.touch- Create a new file.cat- Catenate files and print on the standard output.
These are all part of the GNU CoreUtil suite of tools.
References
Web Links
- Command Line Interface (from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia)
- Shell (Computing) (from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
- Operating System (from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)