What to do if your personal computer is not Linux? - Green-Biome-Institute/AWS GitHub Wiki

Some of you might have already foreseen an important issue... what if your personal computer is not running a Linux operating system? Will the lessons and commands from this tutorial still apply to you?

Definitely! The lessons you learn from this tutorial are absolutely applicable to other operating systems. However, some of the commands are different depending on which system you use. Here is a (very) brief history on why that is and what the differences are between these three main operating systems.

A Brief History of Linux (Still updating..)

MacOS

With that brief history, I can simply just tell you that both Linux and MacOS are both Unix-like/based operating systems, and therefore most commands you will use on Linux will be the same as the ones you will use for MacOS. Great! The CLI is called "terminal on a Mac. For our purposes here at the GBI, you shouldn't have to learn anything new from this tutorial to navigate the terminal on a Mac.

Windows

Windows is a different story. While it did start as a Unix operating system, it is now separate and therefore has different program and command names. The main thing to note here is that they are similar in how you use those commands. You still type text into a text field and press enter, telling the computer to execute that command.

The CLI on windows is called "PowerShell" instead of "terminal". You can find it in your applications folder.

Here are the name of commands that do the same actions as ones we've learned in Linux:

The first command is in Windows PowerShell, the second command is Linux/MacOS, and the third column is a description of what the command does.

Windows Linux Description

  1. dir ls -l Directory listing
  2. ren mv Rename a file
  3. copy cp Copying a file
  4. move mv Moving a file
  5. cls clear Clear Screen
  6. del rm Delete file
  7. fc diff Compare contents of files
  8. find grep Search for a string in a file
  9. command /? man Display the manual/help details of the command
  10. chdir pwd Returns your current directory location
  11. time date Displays the time
  12. cd cd Change the current directory
  13. md mkdir To create a new directory/folder
  14. echo echo To print something on the screen
  15. edit vim To write in to files.
  16. exit exit To leave the terminal/command window.

(I found this list at https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-vs-windows-commands/)

Therefore, in order to get your path in the windows powershell, you would use the chdir command instead of pwd