Command line interface

Now that Core is running in the background, you'd probably want to see what it's doing. An empty screen doesn't see much though. For those kinds of things the bitcoin-cli exists. Using this you can fire off commands to bitcoind and get responses back. You can do everything through the CLI; from getting information about the Bitcoin network, until creating complex multi-signature constructions.

The most useful command which will get you information about everything that's possible, is "help".

bitcoin-cli help

For more information about the different commands you can go to websites like Chainquery. The way the different commands work are explained in depth.

A few useful commands are listed below.

# To check out the current block height
bitcoin-cli getblockcount
# A short summary about the bitcoin network
bitcoin-cli getnetworkinfo
# Blockchain statistics
bitcoin-cli getblockchaininfo

Core is changing continuously. So it could be possible that some of commands above won't work in the future or are named differently.