Abstract

This tutorial will walk you through the basics of how to use the Unix command line.

About This Material

This is a Hands-on Tutorial from the GTN which is usable either for individual self-study, or as a teaching material in a classroom.

Questions this will address

• How can I combine existing commands to do new things?
• How can I perform the same actions on many different files?
• How can I find files?
• How can I find things in files?

Learning Objectives

• Redirect a command's output to a file.
• Process a file instead of keyboard input using redirection.
• Construct command pipelines with two or more stages.
• Explain what usually happens if a program or pipeline isn't given any input to process.
• Explain Unix's 'small pieces, loosely joined' philosophy.
• Write a loop that applies one or more commands separately to each file in a set of files.
• Trace the values taken on by a loop variable during execution of the loop.
• Explain the difference between a variable's name and its value.
• Explain why spaces and some punctuation characters shouldn't be used in file names.
• Demonstrate how to see what commands have recently been executed.
• Re-run recently executed commands without retyping them.
• Use grep to select lines from text files that match simple patterns.
• Use find to find files and directories whose names match simple patterns.
• Use the output of one command as the command-line argument(s) to another command.
• Explain what is meant by 'text' and 'binary' files, and why many common tools don't handle the latter well.