The Fandom Coders Encyclopædia

The command line is a computer interface which receives lines of text from the user and executes commands based on the content of those lines. Frequently these commands will output additional lines of text over the course of their operation, which are displayed for the user’s benefit.

On Unix systems, the command line is frequently the primary means of operating a terminal emulator. Most terminal emulators start up with some variation of the Bourne shell.