Get Terminal for iOS to Bring the Command Line to iPad and iPhone

Get Terminal for iOS to Bring the Command Line to iPad and iPhone

Ever wished you had a native command line in iOS? You know, like a Terminal app for iPad and iPhone? Wish no more, the aptly named Terminal for iOS is here, and its free! Terminal is a sandboxed command line environment for iOS that has over 30 commands currently available, covering many of the most used command line tools and commands you know and love, like cat, grep, curl, gzip and tar, ln, ls, cd, cp, mv, rm, wc, and more, all available right on your iPhone or iPad. Terminal for iOS works great on both the iPad and iPhone, and while its probably best suited for iPad due to the larger screen size, its still fun to play with on an iPhone with a smaller display. Download the app to your device, the icon looks much like the same-named app on the Mac, and launch it on your iPhone or iPad to have some fun. We have the full supported commands list further below if youre interested in this, as does the apps description in the iOS App Store. Because the command line is completely sandboxed, it can also offer a nice and relatively safe way for beginners and more novice users to explore the command line, since all of the commands included in Terminal for iOS will work in Terminal for MacOS, as well as other unix environments. Terminal for iOS gets particularly interesting because you can interact with iCloud Drive from it, so you can make and modify directories and files on the fly, and if you split screen the Files app with Terminal app you can watch it all unfold. This means you can tinker with iCloud Drive from an iOS device much like you can , which opens up a lot of fun opportunities. And yes, you can access the Terminal apps iCloud Drive data from a Mac via Finder or another iOS device via Files app, as long as they are using the same Apple ID. On the Mac just open iCloud Drive as usual and look for Terminal to find the default working directory of the namesake iOS app. Personally Im hoping a future updated version of Terminal for iOS includes a text editor like nano, emacs, or vim, but even without one, its fun to use. As for the currently supported full commands list Terminal for iOS currently supports for the following commands: cat cd chflags chksum clear compress cp curl date du egrep fgrep grep gunzip gzip help link ln ls mkdir mv printenv readlink rm rmdir stat sum tar touch uname uncompress uptime wc whoami Many of our are directly applicable and relevant for Terminal for iOS, including , , , and , as long as its based on a command supported by the app. Oh and this is probably worthwhile to clarify, but despite sharing the Terminal name with the native Mac app (Terminal.app found in /Applications/Utilities/ of MacOS), Terminal for iOS is not an official Apple release. Instead its the work of a crafty developer Louis Dhauwe who open sourced the project, found if you feel like digging around in the source code or building it yourself in Xcode to modify and . But unofficial or not, it is a command line, in iOS. Woohoo! As you can see theres plenty to get started with, though a text editor and ssh would really take this app over the top. Fingers crossed! If you like to tinker around in the command line, youre sure to have fun with this app on your iPad or iPhone, so check it out!