Unix Fundamentals Course

The objective of this course is to provide a comprehensive introduction to the UNIX operating system.

At the end of the course delegates will have the fundamental skills required to login to a Unix system, manage files and directories, use Unix commands and manage processes, use an editor, access the electronic mail facility and create simple shell scripts.

Delegates should be computer literate and familiar with the basic usage of an operating system, although no prior knowledge of UNIX is required.

Topics covered on the 3 day Unix Fundamentals course

Introduction to UNIX

• History of Unix, Unix Features, Unix System V, Standards

Executing UNIX Commands

• Logging in, The shell prompts, Unix Commands syntax, Arguments and options, Basic Unix commands, Terminal characteristics.

Using Electronic Mail

• Reading your mail, Sending mail, Saving mail, Replying and forwarding, Deleting mail messages.

The UNIX Filesystem

• File system structure, Directories and files, Important Unix directories, The Kernel, User's home directory, Naming convention.

Accessing Files

• Wildcards, Pathnames (Absolute & Relative), Changing Directories, Listing files, File details, Sub-directories (making & removing).

Redirection

• Standard input & output devices, redirecting output and appending output, Displaying contents of files.

File Management

• Copying files, Removing files, (interactively & recursively), Moving files, Managing Multiple files, Removing directories

Permissions

• Finding User, Group and other permissions, Read, Write and Execute permissions, Effect of permissions on files and directories, The unmask, Changing permissions on files and directories. Changing file ownership and group

Linking files

• I-nodes, Hard links, Symbolic links

Printing

• Formatting for printing, Sending files to the printer.

Sorting the Contents of Files

• ASCII, Normal Sort, Numeric Sort, Merging Sorted Files, Saving the Sorted Output, Sort Keys, Multiple Keys, Field Separators, Duplicated Records, Case Sensitivity.

Other Unix File Utilities

• Counting words, lines and characters, Looking at the start and end of files, File comparisons Creating ed scripts with diff. Suppressing duplicated output.

Combining Unix Commands and Utilities

• Piping standard output to new commands, Filtering standard output in a pipeline.

Finding Files

• The find command syntax, Defining search, Find actions, Executing commands on matched files

Finding patterns in files

• Grep regular expressions, Special characters

The Unix editors

• Invoking vi, COmmand and edit mode, Moving around, Undo, Deleting, Saving, Pattern searches, Changing text, Replacing text, Moving text, Copying and Pasting, Joining lines, Named buffers, The ed editor, Substitution, Global substitution.

Introduction to Bourne & Korn Shells

• Different shells and features, Invoking a shell, The PATH, Quotation marks, Variables, Shell variables, Exporting variables, Environment variables, Process variables, User profiles.

Processes

• Foreground processes, Background processes, Command priority, Process status, Killing processes

Shell Script Basics

• Creating and executing a script, Script parameters