There are some easy keyboard shortcuts that will help you quickly jump between marks, lines, and pages. So if you’re really, really nervous about making a mistake, it’s okay to type it out in a notepad or word processor, then paste it into the terminal! There’s no wrong way to enter commands into your terminal, as long as they work properly.

It’s also convenient because it can saving you time by auto-completing.Īlso: in most terminals, you can copy/paste commands. It’s the worst having to type a long list of commands over just because your pinky slipped or something. This reduces the amount of typos that can screw up something you’re trying to do, so you don’t have to redo your work. Precise Typing Makes a Happy OSĪnother piece of advice is to use the TAB key to autocomplete terminal commands, if possible. As this Apple Training guide says, always triple-check your typing when using SUDO. So it’s important to be careful with what you’re SUDOing. However, if you make a small mistake, the SUDO command can also mess up system operations on your machine…which can be an interesting way to spend an afternoon. If you know exactly what you’re doing with it, it’s perfectly fine. This command overrides the normal security protections that your OS keeps in place to protect the system from modification. “Super do” or SUDO is a very powerful command in the terminal. Here are four quick tips to go along with this infographic: 1. If you buy a product through my links on this page, I may get a small commission for referring you. It’s unavoidable.ĭisclosure: I’m a proud affiliate for some of the resources mentioned in this article. (If you want to save this for later use, right click and “ Save As“.)Īgain, the only way to ever be a successful programmer is to learn how to work in the command line. Please include attribution to when using this graphic. Take a look below at the Unix commands cheat sheet, perfect for your Mac terminal. So, “exit” does in fact mean to exit the terminal. They have been created to help, not confuse. Luckily, lots of these commands are like their written-out name. The only way to ever become comfortable using the command line is to memorize, memorize, and memorize some more. You can use it as a way to memorize the basic commands. Instead, my Unix commands cheat sheet has been created to act as a quick reference guide. This isn’t meant to be some visually appealing infographic, filled with fancy gradients and sexy charts. That’s why I put together a Unix commands cheat sheet of regularly-used commands in the Unix command line (see below).

It seems like there’s so much you have to know! Not because it’s hard to learn-it’s actually not too difficult once you start-but rather because it is intimidating. When it comes to learning how to code, you might be worried about mastering the command line.

Cheatsheet mac