Unix: Introduction

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Course Overview

UNIX is a highly reliable multiuser, multitasking operating system for platforms ranging from mission-critical clusters and servers to workstations and desktops. To effectively support UNIX systems and the applications they run, a strong background in the structure of UNIX and its many utilities is essential.

In this course, you gain the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary to take full advantage of this powerful and flexible system.

Audience

This course is valuable for user and application support specialists, software developers, or anyone working towards becoming an effective system, network or database administrator on a UNIX platform.

Skills Gained

• Manage data, execute commands and customise your UNIX environment
• Locate files by name, owner, type and other characteristics
• Navigate the UNIX directory hierarchy, manipulate files and control file access
• Interact with and customise the KornShell
• Extract and process information with filters and pipes
• Develop shell scripts to simplify and automate frequent tasks

Course Outline

The Role of UNIX

• Origins, current uses and applications
• The UNIX family: Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, Linux, BSD, and others

Interacting with UNIX

Graphical user interfaces

• The Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
• GNOME, Java Desktop System, others

The command-line interface

• Launching the CDE Terminal Emulator
• Entering commands to the shell

Browsing online documentation

• Displaying manpages
• Accessing Web reference sources

Managing Files

Essential file housekeeping tools

• Copying: cp
• Renaming: mv
• Removing; rm
• Linking: ln
• Editing: vi
• Printing: lp, lpr

Displaying and interpreting file attributes

• Listing files with lsand ls -l
• Identifying file type, owner, group, size, modification time and index number

Establishing access permissions with chmod

• Symbolic notation
• Octal notation

Navigating Directories

The UNIX directory hierarchy

• Home, current and parent directories
• Root directory and subdirectories

Maintaining directories

• Changing directory with cd
• Making and removing directories

Locating files with find

• Searching using file attributes
• Operating on found files

Working with the KornShell

Command history facility

• Listing past commands
• Recalling and editing a previous command

Employing KornShell tips and tricks

• Filename "wildcards": *, ?, [ ]
• Command substitution: `...`

Personalising your shell

• Defining command aliases
• Setting shell variables and options
• Updating the start-up scripts

Accessing UNIX Servers from UNIX and Windows

Logging in to a remote server

• Secure Shell
• PuTTY
• Telnet
• Cygwin
• Others

Uploading and downloading files

• Secure FTP
• scp
• FTP
• WinSCP
• Others

Taming Information with Filters

The UNIX tool-building philosophy

• Filtering data streams through pipelines
• Redirecting standard input, output and error streams

Extracting and restructuring data

• Searching: grep
• Sorting: sort
• Editing: sed
• Trimming: headand tail
• Selecting: awk
• Counting: wc

Matching patterns with regular expressions

• Metacharacter examples with grep
• Substituting patterns with sed
• Refining selections with awk

Developing and Executing Scripts

Writing a simple script

• Storing commands in a file
• Marking the file as executable

Applying special variables

• Parsing command line arguments
• Examining command exit status

Controlling flow of execution

• Iterating through loops with forand while
• Testing conditions with if/else/
• Choosing alternatives with case

Monitoring and Customising Your System

Administering users and groups

• Adding and changing a user account

• Assigning users to groups

Querying UNIX system status

• Measuring disk space usage
• Initiating and terminating daemons
• Scheduling jobs with cron

Creating and extracting file archives

• Gathering files into a "tarball" with tar
• Compressing and decompressing files

Follow On Courses

• UNIX Administration and Support
• UNIX and Linux Security
• UNIX and Linux Tools and Utilities
• Perl Programming Introduction
• User Requirements for Software Development
• Linux Comprehensive Introduction
• Linux Administration and Support

Unix: Introduction / 428