terminal and command prompt (cmd)

[tycheong]

so im kinda new to a mac
(iMac-24 inch 3.06 GHz 4GB RAM 500GB HD GeForce 8800)
and i'm wondering if
terminal is the equivalent of window's cmd.
can terminal do the same things as cmd?
also, on windows i have uhm done some stuff involving cmd and notepad
and i'm wondering if theres something like notepad on OS X.
is there a web site or series of videos showing little tricks and "hacks" you can do on terminal?
thanks!

 

[toolbox]

There is a notepad equivalent in leopard called Text Edit. If you have done scripts in windows and there saved as "bat" files , they will not launch on leopard. Leopard uses the .sh or app format.

Here are a list of commands to help you out,

See the attached file.

 

[AquaMethod]

The Terminal in OS X is a much more powerful tool than cmd.exe in Windows. cmd.exe is a terrible shell, but you have a large variety of shells and scripting languages to use out of the box with OS X. For some neat tricks, check out TUAW's Terminal Tips. To get started using the Terminal for more general computing, look into tutorials on the bash shell. Although a bit outdated, this guide will show you some commands in OS X not found in other Unix-like operating systems.

TextEdit is a great deal more powerful than Notepad as well. It supports spellchecking and grammarchecking, plain and rich text, find and replace, jump to line, and Microsoft Word documents.