A short introduction to the command line

While you may be used to driving applications by pointing and clicking with the mouse and very occasionally typing text, command-line interfaces (CLI) use text commands to drive computer programs. In some sense similar to human language, these text commands must obey a specific syntax to be understood. However, unlike human language, if you don’t follow the syntax exactly, nothing will happen. This syntax powers compositionality, which makes automating complex or repetitive tasks easier – so it is appropriate for lexedata.

All lexedata tools are run from the command line, according to principles explained in the lexedata Manual. There are other excellent introductions to the power of the command line, but if you are completely new to it, the following section may help you get started.

Navigation using the command line

You can navigate to a specific folder using the command line on your terminal (also ‘console’ or ‘command prompt’ or ‘CMD’) as follows: You can see the directory (folder) you are in at the moment (current directory) within the prompt. In order to go to a directory below (contained in the current directory), type cd [relative directory path] (cd stands for change directory), e.g. cd Documents/arawak/data.

If you do not know the path you want to get to, you can open it in your file browser (eg. Finder or Explorer) and usually find it there, either in an address bar or in the folder properties. Sometimes, it also works to drag-and-drop the folder into your terminal.

Note that directory names are case sensitive and that they can be automatically filled in (if they are unique) by pressing the tab key. In order to go to a directory above (the directory containing the current directory), type cd ... Note that you can type any path combining up and down steps. So, if I am in the data directory given as an example above, in order to go to the directory maweti-guarani which is within Documents, I can type cd ../../maweti-guarani.

At any point you can see the contents of your current directory by typing ls or dir, depending on your operating system. (Don’t worry about typing the wrong one: the worst to happen is your system telling you “I don’t know that command.”)