A Tale of Many CLIs

When it comes down to it, there are many command-line interfaces. If you’ve worked on a Linux or Unix server, you’ve likely had some interaction with its interface. If you’re on Windows, chances are you’ve opened the Command Prompt or PowerShell to run some commands.

Many commands are different. For example, a POSIX system might use the command ls to list the files in a folder, whereas a Windows system uses the dir command instead. The command-line interfaces on macOS and POSIX systems use the rm command to remove files and directories, but the Windows CLI requires different commands for each.

This book covers the Bash command-line interface found on Linux, macOS, and Windows 10 through the Windows Subsystem for Linux.^[1] You’ll use the Bash shell. While there are other shells popular among developers, like Fish and ZSH, this book focuses on Bash because it’s the default on many systems, so setup is minimal. Also, this book uses the GNU version of command-line utilities, instead of the BSD versions found on macOS. However, most of these differences are minor, and I’ll point out when things are slightly different and show you how to install the GNU versions of these tools if necessary.