command promptand press enter on macosclick on the spotlight icon in the upper righttype terminaland press enter on ubuntu linuxyou can press the win key to bring up dashtype terminaland press enter the keyboard shortcut ctrl-alt- will also open terminal window on ubuntu just as the interactive shell has promptthe terminal will display prompt for you to enter commands on windowsit will be the full path of the folder you are currently inc:\users\al>your commands go here on macosthe prompt shows your computer' namea colonthe current working directory (with your home folder represented as for short)and your usernamefollowed by dollar sign ($)als-macbook-pro:alyour commands go here on ubuntu linuxthe prompt is similar to macos'sexcept it begins with the username and an signal@al-virtualbox:~your commands go here it' possible to customize these promptsbut that' beyond the scope of this book when you enter commandlike python on windows or python on macos and linuxthe terminal checks for program with that name in the folder you're currently in if it doesn' find it thereit will check the folders listed in the path environment variable you can think of environment variables as variables for your entire operating system they'll contain few system settings to see the value stored in the path environment variablerun echo %pathon windows and echo $path on macos and linux here' an example on macosals-macbook-pro:alecho $path /library/frameworks/python framework/versions/ /bin:/usr/local/bin:/usrbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin on macosthe python program file is located in the /library/frameworks /python framework/versions/ /bin folderso you don' have to enter /library /frameworks/python framework/versions/ /bin/python or switch to that folder first to run ityou can enter python from any folderand the terminal will find it in one of the path environment variable' folders adding program' folder to the path environment variable is convenient shortcut if you want to run py programyou must enter python (or python followed by the py filename this will run pythonand in turn python will run the code it finds in that py file after the python program finishes appendix