This tutorial is essentially the same as one developed at the Mathematics Department at University of Utah. Only some very minor changes have been made.
This tutorial will help you learn the basics of Unix. You should work on it while you are at the computer. Read a paragraph, then try the suggested commands. Do they work as intended? If not, look back at the lesson, and think about what went wrong. It was no doubt a "typo. " Computers, unlike human beings, are rather stupid (even though very fast), and can knot undrstand things that R missspelled or otherwise gurbled.
Think of a computer as an obedient servant: we give it commands, it obeys. The goal of these lessons is to learn to "speak Unix", the language in which we shall command our servant.
Let us begin with a simple command: we want the computer to tell us today's date. Here is how to do it:
% date Fri Mar 25 09:24:30 MST 1994
Wasn't that easy? Note that your commands --- what you tell the computer to do --- are displayed in bold. What the computer replies is displayed like this. Note also that you didn't type " % ": that is the prompt that the computer types. It does this when it is listening for your next command. (Prompts can be different from " % ")
Try the "date" command now.Here are some more commands to try, with samples of how the computer might respond.
% whoami jeremy
whoami displays the login name of the current user, who (for the purpose of these lessons) is "jeremy. " Try this now. The computer should respond with your login name.
% echo This is a test This is a test.
echo does just that: it tells the computer to retype the string "This is a test". Here is another use of echo:
% echo $PRINTER b129lab1
This time echo tells us what is stored in the PRINTER variable --- the name of the printer the computer will use if you print something. Capitalization is important in Unix, so be sure to say "PRINTER", not " printer" or "Printer". The dollar sign in front of the variable name is also important. Note what happens if we forget to use it:
% echo PRINTER PRINTER
Try all the examples above. Also: know where your printer is!
This is as good a time as any to introduce a little computer jargon. The words of the string "This is a test" are arguments to the command echo. The results of a command depend on what the arguments are.
Write down on a sheet of paper the names of all the commands you have used in this lesson. Carry it around with for a few days, and use it to review the commands several times. Do this both at a workstation and away from it. Finally, explain to a fellow student what the commands do. Do this at a workstation so you both can try things out.