How do I get the terminal/command window in a Mac?

Being a “Windows guy” for doggone years, I was used to a command window. Yes, I belong to the DOS era and still use those commands! Additionally, a lot of my work involves perl – that lovely programming language. Over the years, I’ve written hundreds of perl scripts to help me with various things. So it was crucial to port them to my new Macbook Pro.

The first thing was to get a command window, called a Terminal window in Mac. This was actually quite easy.

Here is how to locate the terminal window and add it to the Dock.

1. Open Launch Pad. You should see Terminal’s icon [Slide 1].
2. You can also use the Spotlight search on top to locate the app quickly [Slide 2].
3. Or simply use Spotlight and type in terminal [Slides 3 and 4].
4. Spotlight search will almost immediately display the result – the icon of the terminal window application.
5. Simply drag and drop it in the Dock [Slide 5].

That’s it! I now have a terminal window on my Mac sitting quietly in the Dock.

For those of you who are interested in perl, the scripting language is already installed on the Mac – unlike Windows.

Launch the terminal window and type in the command below:

perl -e 'print "Hello World\n";'

This will print “Hello World”. Cool!

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