Installing MySQL - Learning MySQL - page 13

easily done by typing in commands. For example, you can tell the operating system to
list certain files in a folder or run a given program in a particular way.
Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X all have a command-line interface that allows you to
do this. In Linux and Mac OS X, you use a Terminal program to show you the com-
mand-line interface, which is called the shell . In Windows, you use the Command
Prompt Window program to show you the Command Prompt, sometimes called the
DOS prompt.
In this section, we'll describe how each command-line interface works; you can skip
the descriptions for the operating systems you don't use.
The Linux and Mac OS X Shell
To access the shell under Linux, open a terminal program, such as konsole , rxvt , or
xterm ; these are often listed in the main menu under the System or System Tools group,
and may be simply labeled Terminal. To access the shell under Mac OS X, open a
terminal window by double-clicking on the Terminal icon in the Utilities folder under
the Applications group.
Under Linux, you'll see a prompt similar to this one:
[adam@eden ~]$
while under Mac OS X, you'll see something like this:
eden:~ adam$
This shell prompt indicates what user account you're logged in under, what computer
you're logged in to, and what directory you're working from. You'll generally be first
logged in as an ordinary user (we've shown the user adam here) on the computer
(eden ), and working from your home directory. The tilde ( ~ ) character is a shortcut
symbol to a user's home directory on any Unix-like system, including Linux and Mac
OS X; for example, a user's home directory could be /home/adam , but you can refer to
it as ~adam , or, if you're logged in as adam , simply as ~ . The sample prompt shows that
the user adam is logged in to the computer eden and working from his home directory.
To keep things simple, we'll just show a dollar sign to indicate the Linux or Mac OS X
shell prompt, as below:
$
From the shell, you can run many useful commands; we'll see some as we progress
through this topic. Two standard commands that are important to know for this topic
are:
cd
Changes your working folder or directory on disk. For example, you can change
to the /tmp directory by typing:
$ cd /tmp