3. The Interactive Shell

In most of this tutorial, we assume you start the Sage interpreter using the sage command. This starts a customized version of the IPython shell, and imports many functions and classes, so they are ready to use from the command prompt. Further customization is possible by editing the SAGE_ROOT/ipythonrc file. Upon starting Sage, you get output similar to the following:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
| SAGE Version 3.0.2, Release Date: 2008-05-24                       |
| Type notebook() for the GUI, and license() for information.        |
----------------------------------------------------------------------


sage:

To quit Sage either press Ctrl-D or type quit or exit.

sage: quit
Exiting SAGE (CPU time 0m0.00s, Wall time 0m0.89s)

The wall time is the time that elapsed on the clock hanging from your wall. This is relevant, since CPU time does not track time used by subprocesses like GAP or Singular.

Note: Avoid killing a Sage process with kill -9 from a terminal, since Sage might not kill child processes, e.g., Maple processes, or cleanup temporary files from $HOME/.sage/tmp.

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