TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

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Terminals / consoles / command line for absolute beginners

Mike Huls
TDS Archive
Published in
6 min readMay 24, 2021

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This guy even colored his terminal matrix-green (image by Christina Morillo on Pexels)

You’ve probably seen the Matrix-like screens of a terminal before. Maybe some guy in a movie, wearing a black hoody, sitting in a dimly lit room, grunting “I’m in” hacking the Pentagon or something like that.

The reality, sadly, isn’t that cool. On the other hand the ability to work with a terminal is an invaluable tool in our toolbelt. Whether you are working as a developer or data scientist; a lot of software we use on a daily basis depends on the terminal. Some familiar ones include:

  • Installing Python packages with pip or creating virtual environments
  • Building images and running containers with Docker
  • Working with git
  • Executing programs
  • Building your code

If you are a developer or a data scientist and want professionalize, writing production-ready code then you’ll need to be able to use the terminal for some tasks. In this article I’ll explain what a terminal is, what it does, why it exists and how you could use it to make your life easier. At the end you’ll understand what a terminal is and how it works. You’ll be able to navigate your file system, execute programs and even create files!

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TDS Archive
TDS Archive

Published in TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

Mike Huls
Mike Huls

Written by Mike Huls

I write about interesting programming-related things: techniques, system architecture, software design and how to apply them in the best way. — mikehuls.com

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