The command line is scary. It’s not super friendly looking, it’s hyped up in movies as an interface for only the most elite hacker. Do away with these preconceptions! The command line is 100% Not That Bad and a good tool to know in general. This article assumes a reader with zero knowledge and experience. By the end, you should be able to harness the power of the cli (command line interface) to do some powerful things using zcash-cli.

Basic Navigation

First things first: Your command line interface, whether it’s the Terminal on Mac OSX/Linux or Windows Powershell (chosen for consistent syntax), navigate in much the same way. You’ll first be navigating directories, as you already do in your OS. There are only TWO commands you need to know, “ls” and “cd”. Imprint these commands on your soul, and you’re pretty much good to go, at least for basic use, or a role in a hacker movie.

ls

Typing “ls” on its own (or “dir” on windows), then pressing enter will list the contents your current directory. In the above example, I’ve listed the contents of ~/Documents/Lambda/titanic . “~” means “home” in shorthand, and it’s useful to know. Were it not for the ~, I’d have added complexity and redundancy, because I’d be working (in Windows) in C:/Users/BrunchTime/Documents/Lambda/titanic .

cd

cd stands for “Change Directory.” I know where I can go because I used ls, now I’m navigating to a new directory using cd. This is effectively the same as you double-clicking a folder in your normal OS. I’m now “in” the public folder, and I can work with the files in there.

Congratulations, You’re Already Elite

You now know the majority of what you need to know. There are some platform-specific quirks to actually running programs from here, but you should be able to navigate any terminal you come across with the two above commands. Let’s use our new knowledge and run z_sendmany.