What Is the AWS CLI?

Components of a shell command

Let’s break down the shell and the components we see on screen:

Prompt

The prompt generally is just an indicator that the shell is ready to accept commands.

Command

The first part we enter is the command. In this case, aws. This tells the shell which program we would like to talk to. The shell then searches in our PATH (an environment variable, see below) for a program called aws. To find out where it actually is, we can use the which command by typing which aws. This is useful for debugging if we work in a different environment and want to check if our shell can actually find the program we want to use.

You can try it out in the terminal below. Please type in aws ...