Get in command

Congratulations! You're getting the hang of it.

Now, to unlock the full power of Git, we need to become comfortable using the command-line. Don't worry! The best way to learn is to jump in and do it. We'll take you through the basics now.

Help your team find and open their Terminal or Git Bash.

Briefly introduce the command-line. Let them know that while it may seem weird and annoying to have to type things to work with the computer, you get faster with more practice, and there are a lot of things we can do from here.

The session

When you open your command-line, you enter a new session.

Discuss with your team the concept of a session. You could say that it's like a new conversation that you're having with your computer.

You'll hear the words console, terminal, and command-line used interchangeably. What you need to remember is these are synonymous with having one of these sessions open.

The prompt

When you open a new session, you'll have a mostly empty screen. The session is waiting for you to type something. The place where you start typing is the prompt. This will look like

>

or

$

on most machines, "prompting" you to say something.

Show your team how you run a couple of commands. Show how you wait for the prompt, type in a command -- pwd for example-- and press Enter to run.

Also, be sure to show how they can press the up arrow to bring back previous commands for running.

Where are we?

Ok, let's start typing something. Type pwd at the prompt and press Enter. What happened?

You need to press Enter to submit a command on the command-line. From now on I won't tell you to press Enter, but you'll need to press it after each command before it will run.

It replies with something like /Users/neeraj/. pwd is short for "present working directory". What's a directory? It's a folder. Folders and directories are the same thing. When we typed pwd and Enter, we asked the computer to tell us what folder we are in.

Make a folder

Let's try a new command. Type mkdir gitworkshop/test. mkdir means "make a directory". We told the computer to make a folder called gitworkshop and then make a folder named test inside that folder! If you wanted to make a folder with a folder inside without the commandline, this would take a few steps. Here we did it in one step. There are a lot of shortcuts like this that show the power of the command-line.

We're seeing something else here too. We're seeing that both when we did pwd and mkdir, we saw folder names separated by slashes - / or \. What we're seeing are paths. These are exactly what they sound like, they're paths to a folder or file.

Path

The path is an essential concept. Fortunately, it's something you're familiar with even if you didn't know it. When you go to your file browser and click through folders, what you're doing is navigating the path. There's nothing else to it.

We will us cd and ls to move between folders on the command-line and check whether we've found our file or not. cd means "change directory" and it's exactly like clicking through to the next folder. Try cd ghworkshop. Now, let's try ls. ls means "list". So, we changed folders to the ghworkshop folder, then asked the computer to list its contents. It will list the "test" folder we created earlier.

As your team moves into practice, showing them relative paths -- ../, ./ -- and absolute paths -- /__/__/ -- may be helpful.

Practice

Try finding a file in your file browser, then find it on your command-line by using . Do this a few times. Practice makes perfect!

You now know enough to move forward with unlocking the full potential of Git. If the idea of the command-line still feels iffy to you, stick with it. The remainder of this workshop will provide a little more practice.

Review