Shows the files in the current working directory. This is not necessarily the same as the R working directory you get from getwd(). Shows directory or “folder” you are currently operating in. The most basic commands are listed below: Providing shell commands is also less ambiguous and less perishable than describing human interactions with a GUI. In Happy Git, sometimes we demo the use of a shell for certain tasks, like navigating the file system and doing Git operations, when we don’t want to or can’t use RStudio. The most common shell is bash and it gets thrown around as a proxy for “shell” sometimes, just like “Coke” and “Kleenex” are proxies for cola and tissues. This is how all work was done before we got the mouse and GUIs.

Many programmers spend lots of time in a shell, as opposed to in GUIs, because it is very fast, concise, and ubiquitous in their relevant computing environments. There’s a whole StackExchange thread on the differences ( What is the difference between Terminal, Console, Shell, and Command Line?), but I don’t find it to be terribly enlightening. Pseudo-synonyms are “terminal”, “command line”, and “console”.

The shell is a program on your computer whose job is to run other programs.

Github terminal for windows