Unix for beginners

This is a hands-on tutorial about the Unix framily (including Gnu/Linux) of operating systems for people with no prior exposure to Unix or Gnu/Linux. It consists of a sequence of simple lessons that teaches the reader how to work with the Unix command line interpreter (shell) as well as how to use the basic Unix and Gnu/Linux commands.

The links below lead to draft chapters of a (very incomplete) set of notes about Unix and Gnu/Linux that is maintained by Hannemyr Nye Medier AS to help customers to use the CLI of VMs provided by us. These notes are not login protected, but the URL has only been given to a limited audience consisting of customers that we train and support, and a few others that has expressed interest in the project.

Introduction

• What is Unix?
• Operating system components
• Files and processes
• The file system
• The terminal
• Conventions

The X window system

The Unix shell

• ssh
• keys
• sudo
• script

Getting information

• Manual pages
• Gnu information system
• What type of command?

Redirection

• Redirection
• Redirecting the Output
• Redirecting the Input
• Pipes

Directories and paths

• Listing files and directories
• Making Directories
• Changing to a different Directory

Wildcards

• The directories . and ..
• Pathnames
• More about home directories and pathnames
• Wildcards
• Filename Conventions

Basic operations on files

• Copying Files
• Moving Files
• Removing Files and directories
• Displaying the contents of a file on the screen

Sorting, searching, comparing and counting

• Sorting
• Searching for a file
• Searching the contents of a file
• Comparing files
• Counting lines, words and bytes

Editing

• Screen editors
• Stream editors

Using Unix email clients

• Mutt
• Alpine
• GNU mail
• s-nail

Packaging

• Compression
• Scripting (make)
• Packing and unpacking (tar)

Access rights

• File system security
• Changing access rights

Job control

• Processes
• Listing suspended and background processes
• Killing a process

Delayed execution

• cron

Date & time

• date
• hwclock

Customising the environment

• Shell variables
• Environment variables
• Local variables
• Using and setting variables

Final word

• Other Useful Unix commands

Answers to selected exercises.

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