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Unix

These tutorials will cover some of the basic commands which are common to most of the Unix shells available and some applications. Thus, when you are finished with these tutorials, you will be able to interact with any Unix system as seamlessly as if you had a windowing system available to you.

These tutorials assume you have never used a command prompt or shell before. While this would have been unthinkable ten years ago, the ubiquitousness of GUIs as a front end to operating systems seldom makes it necessary to use, for example, a DOS prompt.

Required Topics

All students are required to understand the first fourteen topics.

  1. Introduction
  2. Review of Terminology for Directories
  3. File Types
  4. Logging into Unix
  5. Passwords
  6. Terminals and Basic Unix Commands
  7. Basic File Editing (pico)
  8. File Management
  9. Copying Files to Unix
  10. dos2unix
  11. Using gcc
  12. Re-directing Output
  13. Other Useful Tools
  14. History of Commands

Advanced Topics

These additional topics are for the interest of the students who would like to gain some deeper knowledge of Unix and shell programming. If there are further topics which you would like to see discussed, please contact me.

  1. Shells
  2. Real Editors
  3. Command-Line Editing
  4. File Examination Commands
  5. Other Directories Commands
  6. Jumping between Directories
  7. Permissions
  8. Process Management
  9. Miscellaneous Other Commands
  10. Manipulating Historic Commands
  11. Executable Scripts
  12. Customizing Your Environment
  13. Regular Expressions
  14. Revision Control (tracking your changes)

If you need help with Unix, assuming you have read these pages, you can always talk to a lab instructor, a course teaching assistant, or any friend in your class who has Linux installed on his or her home computer.

Reference

If you intend to use Unix often (or even occasionally), I would strongly recommend you purchase Jerry Peek, Grace Todino-Gonguet, and John Strang's Learning the Unix Operating System, published by O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. For details, see the O'Reilly web store.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank Timothy Li and Roger Chang Su for their comments and criticisms.