Page 33 - Raspberry Pi as a Foundation for Boosting Computer and Technology Literacy

Shell, terminal, and command line interface 3.1

Figure 3.2 A window of a running LXTerminal

Figure 3.3
The command prompt in LXTerminal

Figure 3.4 Example of a shell command executed within a terminal emulator

essentially functioning as an application with a graphical user interface
(GUI). In contrast, virtual consoles are kernel-managed and operate in-

dependently of the graphical environment. As a result, terminal emu-
lators provide more features and are generally more convenient to use
within a desktop environment. The Raspberry Pi OS comes with LXTer-
minal (LXDE Blog 2021) as the default terminal emulator (Figure 3.2).
Finally, a terminal emulator offers the user a command line interface
(CLI) featuring a command prompt (or shell prompt) – an input space
where a user can enter commands (Figure 3.3). For instance, let us out-
put a string:

echo “Hello, World!”

In order to execute this simple echo command (Figure 3.4), the read-
er would need to type it into the aforementioned command prompt
and then press ‘Enter’.

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