Text files are readable by humans but meaningless to a machine. Files which are encoded in a binary format are not readable by human beings and produce a garbled mess when you try to view them with cat. There are two kinds of files on any computer: binary or text. You could just as easily run the echo command yourself. You are currently inside a BASH shell already (which we call the “login shell”), but you can use the bash program to execute a script inside of a sub-shell. Our BASH script called my_script is one of the shortest scripts you could write. Now that you are back on the command line you can use more or cat to see the file. Type wq, which means “write and quit” in the command prompt and hit enter. While many commands can be executed directly, the command prompt accepts more complicated and useful commands. Open the command prompt with a colon character : which will appear in the lower left. First, use escape to enter the command mode. Now that we have entered some text, we will use the command mode to save the file and exit. The echo command is actually a program which takes many arguments, all text, and simply repeats them. In the example above we have written a command that echoes some text to the terminal.

Let’s write the echo command shown below.Ī batch script is a text file that holds a series of commands (a “batch”) that you might enter directly into the terminal or shell (N.b. You can always tell when you are in the insert mode because the word - Insert - appears in the bottom of the screen. It is absolutely critical that you understand the difference between these modes. Use the i key to switch to the insert mode and the escape key to return to the command mode. We are currently in the command mode, which is designed for issuing commands and selecting text. The tilde characters ( ~) indicate the absence of text. The bottom right shows the line and character number we have selected. Sometimes there is useful information in the bottom row. It has innumerable advantages over modeless editors which are said to make your fingers gnarled from pressing the control key so much. Note: Vim is a two-mode editor which means that you must carefully pay attention to which mode you are using.

Edit text file in terminal