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Introduction to UNIX Course Outline

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These lecture notes and exercises are designed to support an intensive introductory course on UNIX or to act as a reference to users who are new to UNIX. This course was designed particularly for use with the Linux operating system but much of it applies to other UNIX systems as well. These notes are also available online at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~wjk/UnixIntro.

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• Lecture One
• What is an operating system?
• A brief history of UNIX
• Architecture of the Linux operating system
• Logging into (and out of) UNIX systems
• Changing your password
• General format of UNIX commands
• Exercise Sheet One
 
• Lecture Two
• The UNIX filesystem
• Typical UNIX directory structure
• Directory and file handling commands
• Making hard and soft (symbolic) links
• Specifying multiple filenames
• Quotes
• Exercise Sheet Two
 
• Lecture Three
• File and directory permissions
• Inspecting file content
• Finding files
• Finding text in files
• Sorting files
• File compression and backup
• Handling removable media
• Exercise Sheet Three
 
• Lecture Four
• Processes
• Pipes
• Redirecting input and output
• Controlling processes associated with the current shell
• Controlling other processes
• Exercise Sheet Four
 
• Lecture Five
• Connecting to remote machines
• Network routing utilities
• Remote file transfer
• Other Internet-related utilities
• User Information and Communication
• Printer control
• Email utilities
• Advanced text file processing
• Target-directed compilation
• Version control with CVS
• C/C++ compilation utilities
• Manual pages
• Exercise Sheet Five
 
• Lecture Six
• Introduction to vi
• Basic text input and navigation in vi
• Moving and copying text in vi
• Searching for and replacing text in vi
• Other useful vi commands
• Quick reference for vi
• Introduction to emacs
• Basic text input and navigation in emacs
• Moving and copying text in emacs
• Searching for and replacing text in emacs
• Other useful emacs commands
• Other UNIX editors
• Exercise Sheet Six
 
• Lecture Seven
• The superuser root
• Shutdown and system startup
• Adding users
• Controlling user groups
• Reconfiguring and recompiling the Linux kernel
• Cron jobs
• Keeping essential system processes alive
• Exercise Sheet Seven
 
• Lecture Eight
• Shells and shell scripts
• Shell variables and the environment
• Simple shell scripting
• More advanced shell scripting
• Start-up shell scripts
• Exercise Sheet Eight
 

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© September 2001 William Knottenbelt (wjk@doc.ic.ac.uk)