UNIX Getting Started

Explore Unix basics, history, and core concepts like the Unix philosophy, logging in, and essential commands, designed for beginners to intermediate users with no prior knowledge.

Explore what Unix is as a multitasking, multi-user operating system, its kernel and shell, and how it manages time, memory, files, and system calls.

Trace the history of Unix from its 1969 origins through early PDP hardware, the 1980s free software movement, and the Linux emergence led by Linus Torvalds.

Embrace simplicity through a large number of small, single-purpose programs that do one thing well. Open source drives portability and reuse.

Compare gui and cli in Unix by showing console access via the command line interface and contrast it with the X window system’s basic graphical view with mouse input.

Log into Unix with your username and password, open the terminal, and run commands with optional arguments and options. Use ls -l to display a long listing of files.

Gain a brief introduction to Unix, its history, and the underlying philosophy, and examine how the user interface compares to executing Unix commands.

Master basic UNIX commands, file management, and help utilities while practicing date and calendar displays, time formats, UTC, epoch, and notes on root permissions.

Explore help commands in Unix, including ls for listing directory contents, man for manual pages, and info for documentation; learn how to use options and access command descriptions.

Explore essential Unix file management commands: list with ls, navigate with cd, create and touch files, copy and move with cp and mv, and remove with rm.

Learn basic Unix system commands and essential file management tasks, including creating, auditing, deleting, and modifying files and directories, plus using the history command and introduction to Unix file systems.

Explore how Unix file systems organize data under the root, explain key directories like /home, /usr, /bin, /lib, /var, and /dev, and describe binaries, libraries, and devices.

Explore key file system terms, including how file metadata and directories store information, and how blocks are allocated and tracked as used or free.

Explore Unix file types, including ordinary files, special device files, and directories. Read ls -l output to identify file type, owner, size, timestamp, and name, including symbolic links and sockets.

Learn how absolute and relative paths locate files in the Unix filesystem, using the root directory and working directory to represent file locations.

Discover how to view hidden dot files in Unix by using ls -a, and compare them with normal files.

Explore meta characters in Unix, including star for zero or more characters and question mark for a single character, with examples like ls /etc/*.conf and redirection via greater-than.

Explore symbolic and hard links in Unix and soft links. Learn how absolute or relative paths relate to linking and what happens on deletion.

Understand the Unix file system structure, including directory organization, file types, and the purpose of symbolic links to connect paths and their relationships with parent directories.

Explore standard input, output, and error streams in Unix and learn to use redirection operators to direct data to files, combine commands with pipes, and manage file creation and appending.

learn the vi editor in unix, including its two modes, entering insert mode, saving with wq, escaping to command mode, and opening or editing files.

Navigate a file in vi editor in terminal, jump to start or end of file or line, search for terms, and move forward or backward with w and b.

Explore editing in the vi editor, including entering insert mode to add text, copying lines with yank, deleting with dd or dw, and undoing or redoing changes, plus saving edits.

Learn to save and quit in the vi editor using commands like :w, :q, and :wq, including quitting multiple files and forcing actions with !.

Learn to search patterns in the vi editor, move between matches, perform case-insensitive searches, and substitute patterns to edit files.

Use colon s to substitute a pattern with a new word in the vi editor. Learn how to confirm, substitute all, and handle case sensitivity during pattern substitution.

Learn to run shell commands while using the vi editor, navigate the file system, and view directory contents. Practice editing files and executing editor commands to manage text efficiently.

Learn to enable line numbers, wrap long lines, and toggle syntax highlighting in vi. Then use search, pattern matching, and substitution to edit Python files efficiently.

Learn to navigate, open and edit files, search and substitute patterns, and run shell commands using basic text editor operations and file management concepts.

Explore Unix process management by viewing running processes, sending jobs to the background, using sleep and kill with signals, and managing termination with jobs and kill commands.

Explore linux memory management by tracking in-use versus free memory, and learn how processes allocate and release memory. Use top, free, and vmstat to monitor memory and swap.

Learn disk management in Unix by examining filesystem blocks, used and available space, locks, and memory usage, and view results in a human readable format.

Explore how the Unix file system organizes data into files and directories, identify file types with the file command, and locate and compare files using find and diff.

Explore basic system management in UNIX, including using administrative privileges, the exec command to terminate processes, and timing control with sleep, plus exiting the terminal.

Explore archiving in unix using the tar utility, creating and listing archives, extracting files, and applying compression with different options to save space and manage backups.

Explore archiving processes and the commons used in archiving, and compare related technologies. Preview upcoming coverage of user and group management.

Learn how to manage Unix users and groups, create and modify user accounts, understand login and home directories, and the role of password and shadow files in a multi-user system.

Explore UNIX group management, including primary and secondary groups, group IDs, membership, and password storage in group files, with commands to create, modify, and delete groups.

Learn to create, modify, and delete users and groups, and understand how these actions affect file information and group management in Unix.

Explore unix file permissions, showing how user, group, and others access files and directories with the three permission bits—read, write, and execute—to control viewing, modification, and execution.

Learn how numeric file permissions express access with digits, where 0 means no permission, 1 execute, 2 write, 4 read, and 5 read+execute and 7 permissions, related to symbolic form.

Explore symbolic permissions in Unix, interpreting read, write, and execute for user, group, and others. Learn how symbols and signs denote enabled or restricted permissions in file and directory access.

Learn how default file permissions are 666 and directory permissions are 777, and how these translate to read, write, and execute rights for user, group, and others at creation. Discover why directories require execute permission to access contents, and how the next lecture covers changing permissions under a tree.

Learn to view and change Unix file permissions for user, group, and others using symbolic and numeric modes, including adding or removing read, write, and execute permissions with chmod.

Master file permissions by exploring numeric and symbolic methods, learn how to change permissions for user and group, and preview upcoming features in the next model.

Explore basic Unix filters that operate on data from files or standard input, including cat, cut, wc, sort, and translate, and learn to count, reorder, and select fields.

Learn how grep uses regular expressions to match patterns and print the matching lines. Enable case-insensitive matching, show line numbers, and view surrounding lines after a match for context.

Explore sed, the Unix stream editor, to filter, print, substitute, and delete text. Learn range and pattern matching, and apply commands to files or streams.

Explore awk's advanced filters for pattern scanning and text processing, including default field delimiters, tokenizing columns, and printing specific fields from files or standard input.

Learn basic filters used to read and process lines from text files, and note that the next module introduces cell scripting.

Explore the Unix shell, a command-line interface where the kernel executes commands and returns results, and compare Bourne shell and C shell.

Explain login and non-login shells, including enabling non-login shells via /etc/passwd and sbin nologin. Outline the login sequence reading /etc/profile, /etc/bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, and the logout script ~/.bash_logout.

Explore how to navigate directories using paths, understand shell variables and environment variables, assign values with the dollar syntax, and export variables to the environment for use by other programs.

Learn to write and run a basic unix shell script, using a shebang, chmod +x, and executing with ./script or bash script, plus understanding exit codes and variables.

Explore the UNIX getting started module by summarizing core concepts: invoking shell commands, working with variables, writing a simple script, and previewing next steps in this getting started guide.