Navigating Unix.ppt

Navigating Unix UCR Technical Seminar Series Fall ’03 Dan Berger dberger@cs Outline Unix History/Philosophy File System Basics Utilities You Shouldn’t Leave ~/ Without Web, Mail, Office, Windows Printing Looking for Help Asking for Help Learning More Slides online at /~dberger A Brief History of Time^wUnix Born in the late 60’s at ATT/Bell Labs out of the MULTICS project. Ran on a PDP-11. Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, among others. In the 70’s ATT was prohibited from selling Unix, so they gave it to universities. The contributions from some of those universities (such as Berkeley), and later from MIT, evolved Unix into the basic form it still holds today. Unix Philosophy Small tools, each of which does one job well. Build pipelines of these tools to accomplish loftier goals. Users interact with the system through the “shell” – a command-line interface. It’s all about user choice – why have one when you can have three? “Here’s the rope, there’s the tree – help yourself.” File System Basics: / There’s no “C:\”, or “Macintosh HD” – the file system is a tree, rooted at “/” Additional volumes can be “mounted” at (fairly) arbitrary spots in the tree. Some key portions of the tree: . and .. Every directory has two special entries: “.” and “..” “.” is the current directory “..” is one level up toward the root (/) Confusing them can be unpleasant… Trick Question: what directory does “/..” refer to? Home Directories Unix is inherently multi-user – and in a multi-user system, users can’t scribble their files around at random. Each user on a Unix system has a “home directory” – it’s contents, organization (or lack thereof) are completely up to you. When you log in, you are placed in your home directory (abbreviated ~/). Manipulating Files from the Shell File Permissions Recall: unix is multi-user – the file system keeps track of who’s allowed to read, write, and execute a given file. The world is divided into three: the user that owns the file, other users in the group th