Your First Command

Now that you know what the terminal and shell are, let's run your first real command!

The echo command is one of the simplest and most useful terminal commands. It prints text to the screen:

echo "Hello World!"

When you press Enter, the shell reads your command, executes it, and displays the output:

Hello World!

A terminal command usually follows this structure:

command "argument"

• command: the program you want to run (e.g., echo)
• argument: the input you pass to the command (e.g., "Hello World!")

Note: The terminal is case sensitive. For example:

echo "Hello World!"
Echo "Hello World!"

The first line prints Hello World!, but the second fails with a not found error: the command is called echo, and Echo is a different name.