by LARP LAB TH
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Boot up

Open a terminal, type your first commands and find out who and where you are.

Lesson 1 of 38 min

LARP it

Mission. You’ve just sat down at a stranger’s computer in a dark server room. Before you touch anything you need two facts: who the machine thinks you are, and where you are. No mouse. Only the keyboard.

Open a terminal:

  • macOS: press Cmd + Space, type Terminal, press Enter.
  • Linux: press Ctrl + Alt + T, or find “Terminal” in your apps.
  • Windows: open Git Bash or Ubuntu (WSL) from the Start menu.

You’ll see a short line ending in $ or % and a blinking cursor. That’s the prompt. Type these, pressing Enter after each one:

whoami
pwd
date

Say it out loud like the movie: “I’m in.”

Learn it

The window is a terminal. Inside it runs a program called a shell (usually bash or zsh). The shell waits at the prompt, reads the line you type, runs it, prints the result and waits again. That loop is the whole idea.

You typed What it does
whoami prints the name of the user you’re logged in as
pwd print working directory: the folder the shell is in right now
date prints the current date and time, a small program like the others

Every command is a small program. The shell finds it by name, runs it and hands you its output. pwd probably printed something like /Users/you or /home/you. That’s your home folder, the place every new terminal starts.

Two keys that make you look fast:

  • Up arrow brings back the previous command.
  • Tab finishes a name for you when it’s unambiguous.

Check it

  1. Run whoami and pwd. Does the last part of the pwd output match your user name?
  2. Press the up arrow three times. Which command comes back?
  3. Type dat and press Tab. What happens?