Working in the Terminal

Resources

First, let’s start with the basics of writing Python code in a file and running those files. This is the first major step toward actually writing a real program, but it can definitely be difficult the first time without prior experience to rely on. So, let’s go through it step by step and make sure we know how to run our programs in Python.

At this point, we should already have Python installed on our system. For students using Codio, this is taken care of already. For students using their own computers, refer to an earlier lab to find instructions for installing Python on your system, or contact the instructors for assistance.

To make sure that Python is installed and working, we’ll need to open a terminal in our operating system. In Codio, this can be found by clicking the Tools menu at the top, and then choosing Terminal. More information can be found in the Codio Documentation. There may also already be one open for you if you are reading this content from within Codio.

If you are working on your own computer, you’ll need to open a terminal on your operating system. This should have been covered in the previous lab when you installed Python. On Windows, look for Windows Terminal or Windows PowerShell (not the old Command Prompt, which requires different commands). On Mac or Linux, look for an application called Terminal. Throughout this course, we’ll call these windows the terminal, even though they may have slightly different names in each operating system.

Once we have the terminal open, we should see something like one of these examples:

Linux Terminal Linux Terminal

Windows Terminal Windows Terminal

At this point, we should see a place with a blinking cursor, where we can type our commands. This is called the command prompt in the terminal. The first thing we can do is check to make sure Python is properly installed, and we can also confirm that it is the correct version. To do this, we’ll enter the following command and press enter to execute it:

python3 --version

Hopefully, that command should produce some output that looks like this:

Python Version Python Version

Here, we see that the currently installed Python version is 3.10.6. As long as your Python version number begins with a 3, you have correctly installed Python and are able to run it from the terminal. So, we can continue to the next part of this lab.

If you aren’t able to run Python or aren’t sure that you have the correct version, contact the instructor for assistance!

Python 2 vs. Python 3

Notice that we have to use the command python3, including the version number, instead of the simpler python command here. This is because some systems may also have Python version 2, an outdated version of Python, installed alongside version 3. In that case, the simple python command will be Python version 2, while python3 will be Python version 3. Unfortunately, most programs written in Python 3 will not run properly in Python 2, so it is important for us to make sure we are using the correct Python version when running our programs.

Thankfully, the command python3 should always work, and using that command is a good habit to learn. So, throughout this course, we will use the command python3 to run Python programs.

When we open a terminal, it will usually start in our user’s home folder. This may mean different locations for different operating systems. For example, if our current user’s name is <username>, the terminal will usually start in this location for each operating system:

  • Windows: C:\Users\<username>
  • Linux: /home/<username>
  • Mac: /Users/<username>
  • Codio: /home/codio/workspace

The directory that is open in the terminal is known as the working directory. We can use the pwd command to determine what our current directory is:

Print Working Directory Print Working Directory

In this example, we are looking at the Codio terminal, so our working directory is /home/codio/workspace.

Next, we can see the files and directories contained in that directory using the ls command. Here’s the output of running this command in Codio:

List Directory Command List Directory Command

In the output, we can see that there is a file named README.txt and a directory named python. In Codio, we’ll place all of our files in the python directory, so we can open that using the cd python command:

Change Directory Command Change Directory Command

Notice how the python directory is now included in the command prompt in the terminal. Most terminals will show the working directory in the command prompt in some way.

That’s the basics of navigating in the terminal, but there is much more to learn. If you’d like to know more, consider checking out some of the resources linked below!

Resources

Windows & Mac Terminal

Most of the content in this course will focus on using the commands that are present in the Linux terminal, since they are the most widely-used commands across all platforms. In general, these commands should work well on both Windows and Mac, with a few caveats:

  • On Windows, there is an older Command Prompt tool that does not support the newer Linux commands. Therefore, we won’t be using it. Instead, we only want to use Windows PowerShell, which supports most of the basic Linux commands via aliases to similar PowerShell commands. We can also install the Windows Terminal application for a more modern interface.
  • Windows users may also choose to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Linux (such as Ubuntu) directly within Windows. Many developers choose to pursue this option, as it provides a clean and easy to use development environment that is compatible with the Linux operating system.
  • The Mac operating system includes a terminal that uses either ZSH (since OS X 10.15) or Bash (OS X 10.14 and below). This terminal is very similar to the Linux terminal when it comes to navigating the file system and executing programs, which is sufficient for this course.

Fully learning how to use these tools is outside of the scope of this class, but we need to know enough to navigate the filesystem and execute the python3 command. If you need assistance getting started with this step, your best bet is to contact the instructors. Each student’s computer is a bit different, so it is difficult to cover all possible cases here.