What is Terminal Icon for?

Bohumil wrote:
Hello guys,
I am using my MacPro for about a year but this has never happened before. Today I am just browsing the Net and suddenly black Ikon named Terminal appeared in my Dock. I have double clicked on it and when it opened, there was just some script there, some code or something like that. So I have close it, and it disappeared. Could someone give me an idea what this is for, and what should I do with that?
Thank you and I apologize if this is silly question, but I have no idea what that ikon is for.

The terminal is the access to the "engine" under the hood of Leopard. If you have ever used Windows, it's akin to the command or DOS prompt. It gives you access to the real OS known as BSD that runs Leopard.
It's basically a way of doing things by typing commands rather than moving a mouse around and clicking things.
If you are in the terminal, enter
date
and hit enter, you get the date.

When you see someone in these forums saying, do this or do that in a terminal, that's what they are referring to. Sometimes it's the only way to fix things. It's something to learn about.

If you want more info, visit our Unix forum here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=735

It looks like there is still a lot to learn. But I am wondering, by using terminal, isn't there any danger that I would screw something in the system by misusing it incorrectly?

Yes you can mess up your system, so if you are new to using the terminal interface, you might want to make sure you have regular reliable backups 🙂

If you want to explore the Terminal interface, you might want to look for something like "Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger" and ignore that fact that it says "Tiger" as the Unix side has not changed much since Tiger. Heck I'm still using Unix skills I learned in '85 🙂

And how do I access it? Where do I find that Terminal ikon?

I am wondering how the Terminal icon go on your Dock. Of course if it was running it would be displayed and when you Quit Terminal it would go away. In that case it might have gotten their because you double-clicked on a shell script. That might do it.

Terminal is in Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.

There are also alternate terminal emulators available. I personally use iTerm from <http://iTerm.sourceforge.net>. And there are several flavors of X11 based terminal emulators available. If you do not know anything about terminal emulators, then stay with Terminal. But they can be like fine wines, you have to aquire a tasts for them 🙂

You'll find Terminal in Applications/Utilities

/p