The Cursor command line is a separate surface with its own installation, its own updates and its own version. The official way is an install script: on macOS, Linux and the Windows subsystem it installs with one line, and on Windows there is a separate variant through PowerShell. The first thing to do after installing is to ask for the version: that is both a health check and a record of exactly what runs on your machine. It is separate in meaning too: the editor may never be opened at all while the agent in the terminal remains a working tool.

The naive expectation is that installation is the same everywhere and that afterwards the command simply exists. In practice the most frequent first-run problem is not installation but paths: the script places the command into a user directory the shell does not know about. The symptom looks like a missing program, the cause is in the path variable. What adds to the confusion is that the current shell session reads the variable once at start: editing the profile without restarting changes nothing, and the person concludes that the edit did not help.

The command line usually updates itself, but there is also an explicit update command. The difference matters for automation: where reproducibility is required you cannot rely on automatic updates - tomorrow's run may execute a different version with different behavior. In such places the version is pinned explicitly and updated deliberately, as a separate step, with verification.

It helps to see the install commands for all platforms and the version check together once. They are given below. A practical habit worth adopting immediately: write the version into bug reports and automation logs. Half of the unclear discrepancies between machines are explained precisely by different versions, and one line in a log settles the question before it turns into an hour of discussion.

Diagnosing a path problem goes step by step and takes a couple of minutes. First you find out where the command physically lies, then which file the shell finds by that name. A mismatch between those two answers is the nastiest variant: there are several copies, one came with the install script and another from a package manager, and the one that runs is not the one you updated. The report then carries the version you checked by hand while a different one does the work. So the version is checked with the same invocation that does the work rather than with a neighbouring one.