Tutorial: Introduction to the Command Line: Introduction

1. Introduction

Before we can do any scripting you have to learn how to use the Command Line and how files and directories (folders) are organised on your computer. Therefore today we'll start with a tutorial on using the Command Line.

After the Command Line tutorial you'll be able to:

Use the command prompt and the most common commands
Navigate to files and directories and use their relative and absolute paths
Make batch files

During the excersises we are going to use the command prompt.

Note that this course is designed for Windows users. On Mac and Linux there is a different command line interface and you have to use other commands that are not covered in this course.

The preferred way to learn the command is to use this online DOS emulator, so nothing can go wrong on your own system. The exercises are based on this online DOS emulator. The amount of concurrent users of the emulator is limited, so if you can't access it, please try again later.

When you get more familiar with DOS you can use the regular command prompt or the OSGeo4W Shell.

The OSGeo4W Shell comes with QGIS and has everything set for GDAL which we'll use in another module.