How to open a terminal

• MacOSX Open Finder/Applications/Utilities/Terminal (see http://www.wikihow.com/Get-to-the-Command-Line-on-a-Mac)

• Windows Win+X and select ‘Command-Prompt’ (see http://pcsupport.about.com/od/commandlinereference/f/open-command-prompt.htm)

• Ubuntu-Linux Ctrl-Alt-T (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal)

Here is how a terminal looks like in Linux:

Picture of a ‘virtual’ terminal in Linux

In the terminal, you are interacting with a program called a shell.

This program waits for you to type commands with the keyboard.

In this lecture, you will just need to know very few commands:

• Linux/MacOSX pwd, cd, python, ipython

• Windows cmd echo %cd%, cd, python, ipython

To learn more, see the lectures ‘how computers work’ and ‘how to use a computer interactively’.