Intro to Unix Info Page


Assignments and links to other resources for this course

Things You Should Know:

SBU policy is that they own the Syllabus; other material is the property of the instructor who prepared it.
Unix: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Lab Assignments

Week 1: Login, logout, passwd, man, xterm

Week 2: Tutorial chapters 7, 8

Week 3: Show mastery of the man command

Week 4: Tutorial chapters 11, 12

Week 5: Tutorial chapter 14

Week 6: Tutorial chapter 15

Week 7: Regular Expressions (Appx.D); Midterm (including answers)

Week 8: Tutorial chapters 22, 23; Midterm remediation opportunity

Week 9: Tutorial chapters 28, 29

Week 10: Tutorial chapters 30, 31

Week 11: Tutorial chapter 36

Week 12: Tutorial chapter 33

Week 13: Appendix F, G

Week 14: Tutorial chapter 34
 

Things You Should Know:

These are the things you need to know as a result of taking this course. They are so "unix"y  that you probably should memorize them and be able not just to repeat them on a test, but make use of them in decision-making.

Do not depend on this web page being available during the final.

Some basic commands, without which you cannot do much in unix:

man   -- gets additional information on using other commands
lpr   -- prints
vi    -- edit text
emacs -- edit text (xemacs in the lab Linux)
wc    -- counts words and lines
grep  -- finds lines containing regular expression matches and lists them
pwd   -- shows current directory
ls    -- lists the files in a directory
cd    -- changes current directory
mkdir -- makes a new directory
rmdir -- deletes a directory
cat   -- looks at or copies one or more files
cp    -- copies a file
mv    -- moves or renames a file
rm    -- deletes files
chmod -- change file permissions
You should also understand how to use on your command line the options you find in man pages.

Text editing: You need to be able to open a text file, make changes, save, and quit, in at least one of the two editors.

Command line syntax should be familiar enough to you so you can put multiple commands on a single line, and pipe data from one command to the next or redirect it to (and from) a file. You also should know how to start up a process in background, and how to stop it.

Regular expressions have a syntax all their own, which you need to understand and be able to use. Even if you never use unix again, you will run into regular expressions in other computer contexts.

Some students seem to think that square brackets outline or delimit an expression to be matched. They don't. Square brackets set off a list of characters, any single one of which will match one character of target text (or with the caret ^, none of which match). Use quotes to delimit a whole expression. Thus if you want to find three plusses in a row, look for "+++". If you try [+++] it finds a single plus or a single plus or else a single plus (but not three of them).


Also a part of this course, but less important as basic unix knowledge, you should know how to:

Write and use shell scripts
Use make to compile programs, including Java programs
Debug your compiled programs


2004 April 30