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Starting a terminal

A terminal window is how you can access the command line. To get started you need to open one! Depending on how you are running this tutorial, there are a few different ways to do this. In short you can

Please go and read the appropriate section of this page - then when you've opened a terminal window, move on to the command-line basics.

Opening a terminal on JupyterHub​

If you have set up a JupyterLab site (for example by following these instructions) or have access to a JupyterHub cloud instance, you can use it to start a terminal. Logging into the site you should see a page that looks something like this:

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To start a terminal, click the 'Terminal' button which should give you something like this:

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What you see there is the command prompt. It will probably look a bit like this:

<username>@<computer name> ~ % ▮

...that is, it shows your username, the name of the computer you're using, and also the path to the directory you are currently in (which will start of as ~, meaning your're in your home directory.) The prompt will end with a % (or sometimes $) character, indicate the prompt itself.

Note

This command-line prompt can in fact look a bit different depending on where you are running from. In this tutorial we will generally just write a percent sign

%

to indicate the prompt.

To check things are working, let's try out a simple command - type echo "Hello, $USER!"into the terminal and press Enter. You should see something like:

% echo "Hello, $USER!"
Hello, gav!

If this is your first UNIX command - congratulations!

Note

Remember that in the above - the % indicates the command prompt. You shouldn't type the % but just type the command and then press <Enter> to make it run.

One thing to remember about JupyterHub is that it is running in the 'cloud' - the files are not stored on your local computer but on a remote virtual machine. To get any files you create back to your computer, you can download them - you can do this by right-clicking in the file list and choosing Download.

Once you have this working, move on to the command-line basics.

Opening a terminal on your computer​

Alternatively you can use the terminal built-in to your computer - here are some instructions. Doing this depends a bit on which platform you are using:

Linux computers (such as the BMRC Research compute cluster) have the terminal built in. If you're using Linux you almost certainly know how to find this already.

Mac OS X computers also already have a terminal built-in (the operating system is a UNIX-like one behind the scenes). You can find it in Applications/Utilities/Terminal. Drag into your dock to make it easily available, then click to start it.

For Windows computers, things are a bit more complex - you'll need to install something called the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). See here for instructions on getting this installed. The terminal will then appear in your 'Start' menu as an item called 'Ubuntu for Linux'. Click to start it.

Warning

Windows also has its own command line tools, called 'Command Prompt' (or 'cmd.exe') and 'powershell.exe'. These aren't UNIX-style terminals, and work differently to the examples here. For this tutorial, make sure you are using the 'Ubuntu for Windows' terminal.

In all cases you should see a command prompt, similar to the one on the JupyterHub site, something like this:

<username>@<computer name> % ▮

and you should be able to run a basic command:

% echo "Hello, $USER!"
Hello, gav!

Once you have this working, move on to the command-line basics.