Unix Tutorial

Unix Tutorial
Due September 11/12
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Henry Spencer, University of Toronto
Unix: Some say the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it
once.
Karl Lehenbauer
1 Introduction
Modern versions of Linux allow an experienced computer user to do normal computing
tasks immediately without any additional training, but to begin to harness some of the
power of Linux a little work is required. In particular, much of the power of Linux
and other Unix variants can be found in their command line interfaces (CLIs). Many
current users of Microsoft and Apple operating systems have little experience with CLIs
and are only used to graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The purpose of this exercise is to
you expose to the Linux CLIs in order to give you the experience necessary to be more
productive using Linux and other Unix operating systems in the future. Note that if you
findtheUnixtoolsthatyouwilllearnabouthereuseful,thereareoptionsforavailablefor
installing them on your Microsoft Windows computers. MacIntosh OS X users will find
that most of the tools mentioned here are already installed on their computers, though
they may not be well advertised.
2 Account Setup
Youwillprobably findmanyoccasions during this labwhenyouwill wantto transferfiles
back and forth between your Windows and Unix accounts. While there are many ways
to do this (including email them to yourself, put them a USB drive, or on a CD), the
easiest ...