STI Unix lecture

During this lecture we will review the Quick Study guide to LINUX and the Unix portions of the AiS Challenge Technical Guide.

Bring up a window on mode so that we can execute commands and see what they to together.

By now, you should be comfortable with logging in and out and you should have changed your password to something only you know.

Don't worry about user and group manipulation since the accounts and groups have already been set up. All of the teacher accounts are in the same group and when the student accounts are created, each team is in its own group in case they want to share files.

There are different Unix shells that can be used to access the operating system. The default shell on mode is tcsh. The command line refers to what is typed in at the prompt.

The Linux file system is similar to PC files and folders but on Linux, we call folders "directories". Your home directory on mode is /scc/users/chtabcde, where abcde is your initial and first few characters of your last name. cht stands for CHallenge Teacher. The ls command allows us to look at the contents of directories and the cd command allows us to move around to different directories. The mkdir command is used to make a directory and the rmdir command will remove an empty directory. (Use the rm command to remove files.)

I/O redirection is useful in saving the output of command into files or having the output of one program be used as input to another program.

Wildcards allow us to type less by using the asterisk (*) to match zero or more characters or the percent (%) to match one character.

There is no printer attached to mode so you need to copy files to your local machine to print them.

The vi editor is a powerful screen editor that is available on all Unix machines. We suggest that for starters, mode users use the pico editor. It is easy to use with helpful commands at the bottom of the screen. Other editors, like vi or emacs, can be used for complicated editing.

Most of the time you won't need to worry about permissions and ownership but if you ftp files into your public_html directory, they need to have world read permission so you might need to do a chmod a+r filename command to make an html or image file available for viewing.

shell and user variables is more advanced and you probably won't need to use these commands in normal operations, except maybe the pwd command which will Print your Working Directory.

Hopefully, the ls command will suffice for finding files and directories, but other commands are available.

The tar command is useful for archiving files and directories and is easy to use.

ftp can be used in raw mode or with a graphical interface, like WS_FTP Pro, to move files between different machines.

You can customize your environment with login shell scripts which on mode would be the .login and .cshrc files.

job control is useful for running more than one job at a time. You can see what is going on with the system using the different commands described in processes.

Linux (Unix) has lots of commands and many are listed in the command summary so read through these every once in awhile to see if there is a command that will help you use the computer more efficiently.

Now on to the AiS Challenge Technical Guide.