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Introduction to UNIX
What is an Operating System?
An operating system (OS) is a resource manager. It takes the form of a set of software routines that allow users and application programs to access system resources (e.g. the CPU, memory, disks, modems, printers network cards etc.) in a safe, efficient and abstract way. For example, an OS ensures safe access to a printer by allowing only one application program to send data directly to the printer at any one time. An OS encourages efficient use of the CPU by suspending programs that are waiting for I/O operations to complete to make way for programs that can use the CPU more productively. An OS also provides convenient abstractions (such as files rather than disk locations) which isolate application programmers and users from the details of the underlying hardware.

Fig. 1.1: General operating system architecture Fig. 1.1 presents the architecture of a typical operating system and shows how an OS succeeds in presenting users and application programs with a uniform interface without regard to the details of the underlying hardware. We see that:
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The operating system kernel is in direct control of the underlying hardware. The kernel provides low-level device, memory and processor management functions (e.g. dealing with interrupts from hardware devices, sharing the processor among multiple programs, allocating memory for programs etc.) Basic hardware-independent kernel services are exposed to higher-level programs through a library of system calls (e.g. services to create a file, begin execution of a program, or open a logical network connection to another computer). Application programs (e.g. word processors, spreadsheets) and system utility programs (simple but useful application programs that come with the operating system, e.g. programs which find text inside a group of files) make use of system calls. Applications and system utilities are launched using a shell (a textual command line interface) or a graphical user interface that provides direct user interaction.

Operating systems (and different flavours of the same operating system) can be distinguished from one another by the system calls, system utilities and user interface they provide, as well as by the resource scheduling policies implemented by the kernel.

A Brief History of UNIX

UNIX has been a popular OS for more than two decades because of its multi-user, multi-tasking environment, stability, portability and powerful networking capabilities. What follows here is a simplified history of how UNIX has developed.

Simplified UNIX FamilyTree

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In the late 1960s, researchers from General Electric, MIT and Bell Labs launched a joint project to develop an ambitious multi-user, multi-tasking OS for mainframe computers known as MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing System). MULTICS failed, but it did inspire Ken Thompson, who was a researcher at Bell Labs, to have a go at writing a simpler operating system himself. He wrote a simpler version of MULTICS on a PDP7 in assembler and called his attempt UNICS (Uniplexed Information and Computing System). Because memory and CPU power were at a premium in those days, UNICS (eventually shortened to UNIX) used short commands to minimize the space needed to store them and the time needed to decode them - hence the tradition of short UNIX commands we use today, e.g. ls, cp, rm, mv etc. Ken Thompson then teamed up with Dennis Ritchie, the author of the first C compiler in 1973. They rewrote the UNIX kernel in C - this was a big step forwards in terms of the system's portability - and released the Fifth Edition of UNIX to universities in 1974. The Seventh Edition, released in 1978, marked a split in UNIX development into two main branches: SYSV (System 5) and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). BSD arose from the University of California at Berkeley where Ken Thompson spent a sabbatical year. Its development was continued by students at Berkeley and other research institutions. SYSV was developed by AT&T and other commercial companies. UNIX flavours based on SYSV have traditionally been more conservative, but better supported than BSD-based flavours. The latest incarnations of SYSV (SVR4 or System 5 Release 4) and BSD Unix are actually very similar.
Feature kernel name boot init mounted FS default shell FS block size print subsystem echo command (no new line) ps command multiple wait syscalls memory access syscalls Typical SYSV /unix /etc/rc.d directories /etc/mnttab sh, ksh 512 bytes->2K lp, lpstat, cancel echo "\c" ps -fae poll memset, memcpy Typical BSD /vmunix /etc/rc.* files /etc/mtab csh, tcsh 4K->8K lpr, lpq, lprm echo -n ps -aux select bzero, bcopy

Differences between SYSV and BSD Linux is a free open source UNIX OS for PCs that was originally developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish undergraduate student. Linux is neither pure SYSV or pure BSD. Instead, incorporates some features from each (e.g. SYSV-style startup files but BSD-style file system layout) and aims to conform with a set of IEEE standards called POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface). To maximise code portability, it typically supports SYSV, BSD and POSIX system calls (e.g. poll, select, memset, memcpy, bzero and bcopy are all supported).
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The open source nature of Linux means that the source code for the Linux kernel is freely available so that anyone can add features and correct deficiencies. This approach has been very successful and what started as one person's project has now turned into a collaboration of hundreds of volunteer developers from around the globe. As Linux has become more popular, several different development streams or distributions have emerged, e.g. Redhat, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian, and Caldera. A distribution comprises a prepackaged kernel, system utilities, GUI interfaces and application programs. Redhat is the most popular distribution because it has been ported to a large number of hardware platforms (including Intel, Alpha, and SPARC), it is easy to use and install and it comes with a comprehensive set of utilities and applications including the X Windows graphics system, GNOME and KDE GUI environments, and the StarOffice suite (an open source MS-Office clone for Linux).

Architecture of the Linux Operating System

Linux has all of the components of a typical OS:

Kernel The Linux kernel includes device driver support for a large number of PC hardware devices (graphics cards, network cards, hard disks etc.), advanced processor and memory management features, and support for many different types of filesystems (including DOS floppies and the ISO9660 standard for CDROMs). In terms of the services that it provides to application programs and system utilities, the kernel implements most BSD and SYSV system calls, as well as the system calls described in the POSIX.1 specification. The kernel is typically found in the file /boot/vmlinuz, while the source files can usually be found in /usr/src/linux.

Shells and GUIs Linux supports two forms of command input: through textual command line shells similar to those found on most UNIX systems (e.g. sh - the Bourne shell, bash - the Bourne again shell and csh - the C shell) and through graphical interfaces (GUIs) such as the KDE and GNOME window managers. If you are connecting remotely to a server your access will typically be through a command line shell.

System Utilities Virtually every system utility that you would expect to find on standard implementations of UNIX has been ported to Linux. This includes commands such as ls, cp, grep, awk, sed, bc, wc, more, and so on. These system utilities are designed to be powerful tools that do a single task extremely well. Users can often
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solve problems by interconnecting these tools instead of writing a large monolithic application program. Like other UNIX flavours, Linux's system utilities also include server programs called daemons which provide remote network and administration services. A daemon ("Disk And Execution MONitor") is usually spawned automatically at system startup and spends most of its time lying dormant (lurking?) waiting for some event to occur.

Application programs Linux distributions typically come with several useful application programs as standard. Examples include the emacs editor, xv (an image viewer), gcc (a C compiler), g++ (a C++ compiler), xfig (a drawing package), latex (a powerful typesetting language) and soffice (StarOffice, which is an MS-Office style clone that can read and write Word, Excel and PowerPoint files). Redhat Linux also comes with rpm, the Redhat Package Manager which makes it easy to install and uninstall application programs.

Logging into (and out of) UNIX Systems

Text-based (TTY) terminals: When you connect to a UNIX computer remotely (using telnet) or when you log in locally using a text-only terminal, you will see the prompt: login: At this prompt, type in your usename and press the enter/return/ key. Remember that UNIX is case sensitive (i.e. Will, WILL and will are all different logins). You should then be prompted for your password: login: will password: Type your password in at the prompt and press the enter/return/ will not be displayed on the screen as you type it in. key. Note that your password

If you mistype your username or password you will get an appropriate message from the computer and you will be presented with the login: prompt again. Otherwise you should be presented with a shell prompt which looks something like this: $
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To log out of a text-based UNIX shell, type "exit" at the shell prompt (or if that doesn't work try "logout"; if that doesn't work press ctrl-d). Graphical terminals: If you're logging into a UNIX computer locally, or if you are using a remote login facility that supports graphics, you might instead be presented with a graphical prompt with login and password fields. Enter your user name and password in the same way as above (N.B. you may need to press the TAB key to move between fields). Once you are logged in, you should be presented with a graphical window manager that looks similar to the Microsoft Windows interface. To bring up a window containing a shell prompt look for menus or icons which mention the words "shell", "xterm", "console" or "terminal emulator". To log out of a graphical window manager, look for menu options similar to "Log out" or "Exit".

Changing your password

One of the things you should do when you log in for the first time is to change your password. The UNIX command to change your password is passwd:
$ passwd

The system will prompt you for your old password, then for your new password. To eliminate any possible typing errors you have made in your new password, it will ask you to reconfirm your new password. Remember the following points when choosing your password:
o o

Avoid characters which might not appear on all keyboards, e.g. ''. The weakest link in most computer security is user passwords so keep your password a secret, don't write it down and don't tell it to anyone else. Also avoid dictionary words or words related to your personal details (e.g. your boyfriend or girlfriend's name or your login). Make it at least 7 or 8 characters long and try to use a mix of letters, numbers and punctuation.

General format of UNIX commands

A UNIX command line consists of the name of a UNIX command (actually the "command" is the name of a built-in shell command, a system utility or an application program) followed by its "arguments" (options and the target filenames and/or expressions). The general syntax for a UNIX command is
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$ command -options targets Here command can be though of as a verb, options as an adverb and targets as the direct objects of the verb. In the case that the user wishes to specify several options, these need not always be listed separately (the options can sometimes be listed altogether after a single dash).

Log on a Linux machine or connect to one from a Windows machine (e.g. click on the Exceed icon and then use putty to connect to the server kiwi. Enter your login (user name) and password at relevant prompts. Enter these commands at the UNIX prompt, and try to interpret the output. Ask questions and don't be afraid to experiment (as a normal user you cannot do much harm): o echo hello world o passwd o date o hostname o arch o uname -a o dmesg | more (you may need to press q to quit) o uptime o who am i o who o id o last o finger o w o top (you may need to press q to quit) o echo $SHELL o echo {con,pre}{sent,fer}{s,ed} o man "automatic door" o man ls (you may need to press q to quit) o man who (you may need to press q to quit) o who can tell me why i got divorced o lost o clear o cal 2000 o cal 9 1752 (do you notice anything unusual?) o bc -l (type quit or press Ctrl-d to quit) o echo 5+4 | bc -l o yes please (you may need to press Ctrl-c to quit) o time sleep 5 o history

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The UNIX Filesystem

The UNIX operating system is built around the concept of a filesystem which is used to store all of the information that constitutes the long-term state of the system. This state includes the operating system kernel itself, the executable files for the commands supported by the operating system, configuration information, temporary workfiles, user data, and various special files that are used to give controlled access to system hardware and operating system functions. Every item stored in a UNIX filesystem belongs to one of four types:
1. Ordinary files

Ordinary files can contain text, data, or program information. Files cannot contain other files or directories. Unlike other operating systems, UNIX filenames are not broken into a name part and an extension part (although extensions are still frequently used as a means to classify files). Instead they can contain any keyboard character except for '/' and be up to 256 characters long (note however that characters such as *,?,# and & have special meaning in most shells and should not therefore be used in filenames). Putting spaces in filenames also makes them difficult to manipulate rather use the underscore '_'.
2. Directories

Directories are containers or folders that hold files, and other directories.
3. Devices

To provide applications with easy access to hardware devices, UNIX allows them to be used in much the same way as ordinary files. There are two types of devices in UNIX - block-oriented devices which transfer data in blocks (e.g. hard disks) and character-oriented devices that transfer data on a byte-by-byte basis (e.g. modems and dumb terminals).
4. Links

A link is a pointer to another file. There are two types of links - a hard link to a file is indistinguishable from the file itself. A soft link (or symbolic link) provides an indirect pointer or shortcut to a file. A soft link is implemented as a directory file entry containing a pathname.

Typical UNIX Directory Structure

The UNIX filesystem is laid out as a hierarchical tree structure which is anchored at a special toplevel directory known as the root (designated by a slash '/'). Because of the tree structure, a directory can have many child directories, but only one parent directory.
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Fig. 2.1: Part of a typical UNIX filesystem tree To specify a location in the directory hierarchy, we must specify a path through the tree. The path to a location can be defined by an absolute path from the root /, or as a relative path from the current working directory. To specify a path, each directory along the route from the source to the destination must be included in the path, with each directory in the sequence being separated by a slash. To help with the specification of relative paths, UNIX provides the shorthand " ." for the current directory and ".." for the parent directory. For example, the absolute path to the directory "play" is /home/will/play, while the relative path to this directory from "zeb" is ../will/play. Fig. 2.2 shows some typical directories you will find on UNIX systems and briefly describes their contents. Note that these although these subdirectories appear as part of a seamless logical filesystem, they do not need be present on the same hard disk device; some may even be located on a remote machine and accessed across a network.
Directory / /bin /usr/bin /sbin /lib /usr/lib /tmp /home or /homes /etc /dev Typical Contents The "root" directory Essential low-level system utilities Higher-level system utilities and application programs Superuser system utilities (for performing system administration tasks) Program libraries (collections of system calls that can be included in programs by a compiler) for low-level system utilities Program libraries for higher-level user programs Temporary file storage space (can be used by any user) User home directories containing personal file space for each user. Each directory is named after the login of the user. UNIX system configuration and information files Hardware devices

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A pseudo-filesystem which is used as an interface to the kernel. Includes a sub-directory for each active program (or process).

Fig. 2.2: Typical UNIX directories When you log into UNIX, your current working directory is your user home directory. You can refer to your home directory at any time as " ~" and the home directory of other users as "~<login>". So ~will/play is another way for user jane to specify an absolute path to the directory /homes/will/play. User will may refer to the directory as ~/play.

Directory and File Handling Commands

This section describes some of the more important directory and file handling commands.
pwd pwd

(print [current] working directory) displays the full absolute path to the your current location in the filesystem. So $ pwd /usr/bin

implies that /usr/bin is the current working directory.

ls ls

(list directory)

lists the contents of a directory. If no target directory is given, then the contents of the current working directory are displayed. So, if the current working directory is /, $ ls bin boot dev etc home lib mnt proc share sbin usr tmp var vol

Actually, ls doesn't show you all the entries in a directory - files and directories that begin with a dot (.) are hidden (this includes the directories '.' and '..' which are always present). The reason for this is that files that begin with a . usually contain important configuration information and should not be changed under normal circumstances. If you want to see all files, ls supports the -a option: $ ls -a Even this listing is not that helpful - there are no hints to properties such as the size, type and ownership of files, just their names. To see more detailed information, use the -l option (long listing), which can be combined with the -a option as follows:

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$ ls -a -l (or, equivalently,) $ ls -al Each line of the output looks like this:

where:
o o

o o o o o o

type is a single character which is either 'd' (directory), '-' (ordinary file), 'l' (symbolic link), 'b' (block-oriented device) or 'c' (character-oriented device). permissions is a set of characters describing access rights. There are 9 permission characters, describing 3 access types given to 3 user categories. The three access types are read ('r'), write ('w') and execute ('x'), and the three users categories are the user who owns the file, users in the group that the file belongs to and other users (the general public). An 'r', 'w' or 'x' character means the corresponding permission is present; a '-' means it is absent. links refers to the number of filesystem links pointing to the file/directory (see the discussion on hard/soft links in the next section). owner is usually the user who created the file or directory. group denotes a collection of users who are allowed to access the file according to the group access rights specified in the permissions field. size is the length of a file, or the number of bytes used by the operating system to store the list of files in a directory. date is the date when the file or directory was last modified (written to). The -u option display the time when the file was last accessed (read). name is the name of the file or directory.

ls

supports more options. To find out what they are, type: $ man ls

is the online UNIX user manual, and you can use it to get help with commands and find out about what options are supported. It has quite a terse style which is often not that helpful, so some users prefer to the use the (non-standard) info utility if it is installed:
man

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$ info ls
cd

(change [current working] directory)

$ cd

path

changes your current working directory to path (which can be an absolute or a relative path). One of the most common relative paths to use is '..' (i.e. the parent directory of the current directory). Used without any target directory $ cd resets your current working directory to your home directory (useful if you get lost). If you change into a directory and you subsequently want to return to your original directory, use $ cd mkdir

(make directory) directory

$ mkdir

creates a subdirectory called directoryin the current working directory. You can only create subdirectories in a directory if you have write permission on that directory.
rmdir

(remove directory) directory

$ rmdir

removes the subdirectory directory from the current working directory. You can only remove subdirectories if they are completely empty (i.e. of all entries besides the '.' and '..' directories).
cp cp

(copy) is used to make copies of files or entire directories. To copy files, use:
$ cp

source-file(s) destination

where source-file(s) and destination specify the source and destination of the copy respectively. The behaviour of cp depends on whether the destination is a file or a
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directory. If the destination is a file, only one source file is allowed and cp makes a new file called destination that has the same contents as the source file. If the destination is a directory, many source files can be specified, each of which will be copied into the destination directory. Section 2.6 will discuss efficient specification of source files using wildcard characters. To copy entire directories (including their contents), use a recursive copy:
$ cp -rd

source-directories destination-directory

mv mv

(move/rename)

is used to rename files/directories and/or move them from one directory into another. Exactly one source and one destination must be specified:
$ mv

source destination

If destination is an existing directory, the new name for source (whether it be a file or a directory) will be destination/source. If source and destination are both files, source is renamed destination. N.B.: if destination is an existing file it will be destroyed and overwritten by source (you can use the -i option if you would like to be asked for confirmation before a file is overwritten in this way).
rm

(remove/delete)
$ rm

target-file(s)

removes the specified files. Unlike other operating systems, it is almost impossible to recover a deleted file unless you have a backup (there is no recycle bin!) so use this command with care. If you would like to be asked before files are deleted, use the -i option: $ rm -i myfile rm: remove 'myfile'? can also be used to delete directories (along with all of their contents, including any subdirectories they contain). To do this, use the -r option. To avoid rm from asking any questions or giving errors (e.g. if the file doesn't exist) you used the -f (force) option. Extreme care needs to be taken when using this option - consider what would happen if a system administrator was trying to delete user will's home directory and accidentally typed:
rm

$ rm -rf / home/will
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(instead of
cat

rm -rf /home/will).

(catenate/type)
$ cat

target-file(s)

displays the contents of target-file(s) on the screen, one after the other. You can also use it to create files from keyboard input as follows ( > is the output redirection operator, which will be discussed in the next chapter): $ cat > hello.txt hello world! [ctrl-d] $ ls hello.txt hello.txt $ cat hello.txt hello world! $
more

and less (catenate with pause) target-file(s)

$ more

displays the contents of target-file(s) on the screen, pausing at the end of each screenful and asking the user to press a key (useful for long files). It also incorporates a searching facility (press '/' and then type a phrase that you want to look for). You can also use more to break up the output of commands that produce more than one screenful of output as follows (| is the pipe operator, which will be discussed in the next chapter): $ ls -l | more is just like more, except that has a few extra features (such as allowing users to scroll backwards and forwards through the displayed file). less not a standard utility, however and may not be present on all UNIX systems.
less

Making Hard and Soft (Symbolic) Links

Direct (hard) and indirect (soft or symbolic) links from one file or directory to another can be created using the ln command.
$ ln

filename linkname
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creates another directory entry for filename called linkname (i.e. linkname is a hard link). Both directory entries appear identical (and both now have a link count of 2). If either filename or linkname is modified, the change will be reflected in the other file (since they are in fact just two different directory entries pointing to the same file).
$ ln -s

filename linkname

creates a shortcut called linkname (i.e. linkname is a soft link). The shortcut appears as an entry with a special type ('l'): $ ln -s hello.txt bye.txt $ ls -l bye.txt lrwxrwxrwx 1 will finance 13 bye.txt -> hello.txt $ The link count of the source file remains unaffected. Notice that the permission bits on a symbolic link are not used (always appearing as rwxrwxrwx). Instead the permissions on the link are determined by the permissions on the target ( hello.txt in this case). Note that you can create a symbolic link to a file that doesn't exist, but not a hard link. Another difference between the two is that you can create symbolic links across different physical disk devices or partitions, but hard links are restricted to the same disk partition. Finally, most current UNIX implementations do not allow hard links to point to directories.

Specifying multiple filenames

Multiple filenames can be specified using special pattern-matching characters. The rules are:

'?' matches any single character in that position in the filename. '*' matches zero or more characters in the filename. A '*' on its own will match all files. '*.*' matches all files with containing a '.'. Characters enclosed in square brackets ('[' and ']') will match any filename that has one of those characters in that position. A list of comma separated strings enclosed in curly braces ("{" and "}") will be expanded as a Cartesian product with the surrounding characters.

For example:
1. 2. 3. 4.

matches all three-character filenames. ?ell? matches any five-character filenames with 'ell' in the middle. he* matches any filename beginning with 'he'. [m-z]*[a-l] matches any filename that begins with a letter from 'm' to 'z' and ends in a letter from 'a' to 'l'.
???

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5. {/usr,}{/bin,/lib}/file expands to /usr/bin/file /usr/lib/file /bin/file and

Note that the UNIX shell performs these expansions (including any filename matching) on a command's arguments before the command is executed.

Quotes
As we have seen certain special characters (e.g. '*', '-','{' etc.) are interpreted in a special way by the shell. In order to pass arguments that use these characters to commands directly (i.e. without filename expansion etc.), we need to use special quoting characters. There are three levels of quoting that you can try:
1. Try insert a '\' in front of the special character. 2. Use double quotes (") around arguments to prevent most expansions. 3. Use single forward quotes (') around arguments to prevent all expansions.

There is a fourth type of quoting in UNIX. Single backward quotes (`) are used to pass the output of some command as an input argument to another. For example: $ hostname rose $ echo this machine is called `hostname` this machine is called rose

File and Directory Permissions

Permission File read User can look at the contents of the file User can modify the contents of the file User can use the filename as a UNIX command Directory User can list the files in the directory

write

User can create new files and remove existing files in the directory User can change into the directory, but cannot list the files unless (s)he has read permission. User can read files if (s)he has read permission on them.

execute

Fig 3.1: Interpretation of permissions for files and directories As we have seen in the previous chapter, every file or directory on a UNIX system has three types of permissions, describing what operations can be performed on it by various categories of users. The permissions are read (r), write (w) and execute (x), and the three categories of users are user/owner (u), group (g) and others (o). Because files and directories are different entities, the interpretation of the permissions assigned to each differs slightly, as shown in Fig 3.1.
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File and directory permissions can only be modified by their owners, or by the superuser (root), by using the chmod system utility.
chmod

(change [file or directory] mode) options files

$ chmod chmod

accepts options in two forms. Firstly, permissions may be specified as a sequence of 3 octal digits (octal is like decimal except that the digit range is 0 to 7 instead of 0 to 9). Each octal digit represents the access permissions for the user/owner, group and others respectively. The mappings of permissions onto their corresponding octal digits is as follows:
----x -w-wx r-r-x rwrwx 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

For example the command: $ chmod 600 private.txt sets the permissions on private.txt to rw------- (i.e. only the owner can read and write to the file). Permissions may be specified symbolically, using the symbols u (user), g (group), o (other), a (all), r (read), w (write), x (execute), + (add permission), - (take away permission) and = (assign permission). For example, the command: $ chmod ug=rw,o-rw,a-x *.txt sets the permissions on all files ending in *.txt to rw-rw---- (i.e. the owner and users in the file's group can read and write to the file, while the general public do not have any sort of access). also supports a -R option which can be used to recursively modify file permissions, e.g.
chmod

$ chmod -R go+r play

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will grant group and other read rights to the directory play and all of the files and directories within play.
chgrp

(change group) group files

$ chgrp

can be used to change the group that a file or directory belongs to. It also supports a -R option.

Inspecting File Content

Besides cat there are several other useful utilities for investigating the contents of files:
file file

filename(s)

analyzes a file's contents for you and reports a high-level description of what type of file it appears to be: $ file myprog.c letter.txt webpage.html myprog.c: C program text letter.txt: English text webpage.html: HTML document text file can identify a wide range of files but sometimes gets understandably confused (e.g. when trying to automatically detect the difference between C++ and Java code).
head, tail head

filename

and tail display the first and last few lines in a file respectively. You can specify the number of lines as an option, e.g. $ tail -20 messages.txt $ head -5 messages.txt includes a useful -f option that can be used to continuously monitor the last few lines of a (possibly changing) file. This can be used to monitor log files, for example:
tail

$ tail -f /var/log/messages continuously outputs the latest additions to the system log file.

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options binaryfile

can be used to disassemble binary files - that is it can show the machine language instructions which make up compiled application programs and system utilities.
od od

options filename (octal dump)

can be used to displays the contents of a binary or text file in a variety of formats, e.g. $ cat hello.txt hello world $ od -c hello.txt 0000000 h e l l o w o r l 0000014 $ od -x hello.txt 0000000 6865 6c6c 6f20 776f 726c 640a 0000014

d \n

There are also several other useful content inspectors that are non-standard (in terms of availability on UNIX systems) but are nevertheless in widespread use. They are summarised in Fig. 3.2.
File type Portable Document Format Postscript Document DVI Document JPEG Image GIF Image MPEG movie WAV sound file HTML document Typical extension .pdf .ps .dvi .jpg .gif .mpg .wav .html Content viewer acroread ghostview xdvi xv xv mpeg_play realplayer netscape

Fig 3.2: Other file types and appropriate content viewers.

Finding Files
There are at least three ways to find files when you don't know their exact location:

find If you have a rough idea of the directory tree the file might be in (or even if you don't and you're prepared to wait a while) you can use find:
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-print

directory

-name

targetfile

will look for a file called targetfile in any part of the directory tree rooted at directory. targetfile can include wildcard characters. For example: $ find /home -name "*.txt" -print 2>/dev/null will search all user directories for any file ending in " .txt" and output any matching files (with a full absolute or relative path). Here the quotes (") are necessary to avoid filename expansion, while the 2>/dev/null suppresses error messages (arising from errors such as not being able to read the contents of directories for which the user does not have the right permissions). can in fact do a lot more than just find files by name. It can find files by type (e.g. -type f for files, -type d for directories), by permissions (e.g. -perm o=r for all files and directories that can be read by others), by size ( -size) etc. You can also execute commands on the files you find. For example,
find $ find . -name "*.txt" -exec wc -l '{}' ';'

counts the number of lines in every text file in and below the current directory. The '{}' is replaced by the name of each file found and the ';' ends the -exec clause. For more information about find and its abilities, use man
which find

and/or info

find.

(sometimes also called whence) command

If you can execute an application program or system utility by typing its name at the shell prompt, you can use which to find out where it is stored on disk. For example: $ which ls /bin/ls
locate find

string

can take a long time to execute if you are searching a large filespace (e.g. searching from / downwards). The locate command provides a much faster way of locating all files whose names match a particular search string. For example: $ locate ".txt" will find all filenames in the filesystem that contain ".txt" anywhere in their full paths. One disadvantage of locate is it stores all filenames on the system in an index that is usually updated only once a day. This means locate will not find files that have been created very recently. It may also report filenames as being present even though
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the file has just been deleted. Unlike find, locate cannot track down files on the basis of their permissions, size and so on.

Finding Text in Files

grep

(General Regular Expression Print) options pattern files

$ grep grep

searches the named files (or standard input if no files are named) for lines that match a given pattern. The default behaviour of grep is to print out the matching lines. For example: $ grep hello *.txt searches all text files in the current directory for lines containing "hello". Some of the more useful options that grep provides are: -c (print a count of the number of lines that match), -i (ignore case), -v (print out the lines that don't match the pattern) and -n (printout the line number before printing the matching line). So $ grep -vi hello *.txt searches all text files in the current directory for lines that do not contain any form of the word hello (e.g. Hello, HELLO, or hELlO). If you want to search all files in an entire directory tree for a particular pattern, you can combine grep with find using backward single quotes to pass the output from find into grep. So $ grep hello `find . -name "*.txt" -print` will search all text files in the directory tree rooted at the current directory for lines containing the word "hello". The patterns that grep uses are actually a special type of pattern known as regular expressions. Just like arithemetic expressions, regular expressions are made up of basic subexpressions combined by operators. The most fundamental expression is a regular expression that matches a single character. Most characters, including all letters and digits, are regular expressions that match themselves. Any other character with special meaning may be quoted by preceding it with a backslash (\). A list of characters enclosed by '[' and ']' matches any single character in that list; if the first character of the list is the caret `^', then it
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matches any character not in the list. A range of characters can be specified using a dash (-) between the first and last items in the list. So [0-9] matches any digit and [^a-z] matches any character that is not a digit. The caret `^' and the dollar sign `$' are special characters that match the beginning and end of a line respectively. The dot '.' matches any character. So $ grep ^..[l-z]$ hello.txt matches any line in hello.txt that contains a three character sequence that ends with a lowercase letter from l to z. (extended grep) is a variant of grep that supports more sophisticated regular expressions. Here two regular expressions may be joined by the operator `|'; the resulting regular expression matches any string matching either subexpression. Brackets '(' and ')' may be used for grouping regular expressions. In addition, a regular expression may be followed by one of several repetition operators:
egrep

means the preceding item is optional (matched at most once). `*' means the preceding item will be matched zero or more times. `+' means the preceding item will be matched one or more times. `{N}' means the preceding item is matched exactly N times. `{N,}' means the preceding item is matched N or more times. `{N,M}' means the preceding item is matched at least N times, but not more than M times.
`?'

For example, if egrep was given the regular expression '(^[0-9]{1,5}[a-zA-Z ]+$)|none' it would match any line that either:
o o

begins with a number up to five digits long, followed by a sequence of one or more letters or spaces, or contains the word none

You can read more about regular expressions on the grep and egrep manual pages.

Sorting files
There are two facilities that are useful for sorting files in UNIX:
sort

filenames
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sorts lines contained in a group of files alphabetically (or if the -n option is specified) numerically. The sorted output is displayed on the screen, and may be stored in another file by redirecting the output. So $ sort input1.txt input2.txt > output.txt outputs the sorted concentenation of files input1.txt and input2.txt to the file output.txt.
uniq uniq

filename

removes duplicate adjacent lines from a file. This facility is most useful when combined with sort: $ sort input.txt | uniq > output.txt

File Compression and Backup

UNIX systems usually support a number of utilities for backing up and compressing files. The most useful are:
tar tar

(tape archiver)

backs up entire directories and files onto a tape device or (more commonly) into a single disk file known as an archive. An archive is a file that contains other files plus information about them, such as their filename, owner, timestamps, and access permissions. tar does not perform any compression by default. To create a disk file tar archive, use
$ tar -cvf

archivenamefilenames

where archivename will usually have a .tar extension. Here the c option means create, v means verbose (output filenames as they are archived), and f means file.To list the contents of a tar archive, use
$ tar -tvf

archivename

To restore files from a tar archive, use

$ tar -xvf

archivename

cpio
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cpio

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is another facility for creating and reading archives. Unlike tar, cpio doesn't automatically archive the contents of directories, so it's common to combine cpio with find when creating an archive:
$ find . -print -depth | cpio -ov -Htar >

archivename

This will take all the files in the current directory and the directories below and place them in an archive called archivename.The -depth option controls the order in which the filenames are produced and is recommended to prevent problems with directory permissions when doing a restore.The -o option creates the archive, the -v option prints the names of the files archived as they are added and the H option specifies an archive format type (in this case it creates a tar archive). Another common archive type is crc, a portable format with a checksum for error control. To list the contents of a cpio archive, use
$ cpio -tv <

archivename

To restore files, use:

$ cpio -idv <

archivename

Here the -d option will create directories as necessary. To force cpio to extract files on top of files of the same name that already exist (and have the same or later modification time), use the -u option.
compress, gzip

and gzip are utilities for compressing and decompressing individual files (which may be or may not be archive files). To compress files, use:
compress $ compress

filename

or
$ gzip

filename

In each case, filename will be deleted and replaced by a compressed file called filename.Z or filename.gz. To reverse the compression process, use: $ compress -d filename or $ gzip -d filename

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Handling Removable Media (e.g. floppy disks)

UNIX supports tools for accessing removable media such as CDROMs and floppy disks.

mount, umount The mount command serves to attach the filesystem found on some device to the filesystem tree. Conversely, the umount command will detach it again (it is very important to remember to do this when removing the floppy or CDROM). The file /etc/fstab contains a list of devices and the points at which they will be attached to the main filesystem: $ cat /etc/fstab /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto rw,user,noauto iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0 0 0

In this case, the mount point for the floppy drive is /mnt/floppy and the mount point for the CDROM is /mnt/cdrom. To access a floppy we can use: $ mount /mnt/floppy $ cd /mnt/floppy $ ls (etc...) To force all changed data to be written back to the floppy and to detach the floppy disk from the filesystem, we use: $ umount /mnt/floppy

mtools If they are installed, the (non-standard) mtools utilities provide a convenient way of accessing DOS-formatted floppies without having to mount and unmount filesystems. You can use DOS-type commands like "mdir a:", "mcopy a:*.* .", "mformat a:", etc. (see the mtools manual pages for more details).

Processes
A process is a program in execution. Every time you invoke a system utility or an application program from a shell, one or more "child" processes are created by the shell in response to your command. All UNIX processes are identified by a unique process identifier or PID. An important process that is always present is the init process. This is the first process to be created when a UNIX system starts up and usually has a PID of 1. All other processes are said to be "descendants" of init.
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Pipes
The pipe ('|') operator is used to create concurrently executing processes that pass data directly to one another. It is useful for combining system utilities to perform more complex functions. For example: $ cat hello.txt | sort | uniq creates three processes (corresponding to cat, sort and uniq) which execute concurrently. As they execute, the output of the who process is passed on to the sort process which is in turn passed on to the uniq process. uniq displays its output on the screen (a sorted list of users with duplicate lines removed). Similarly: $ cat hello.txt | grep "dog" | grep -v "cat" finds all lines in hello.txt that contain the string "dog" but do not contain the string "cat".

Redirecting input and output

The output from programs is usually written to the screen, while their input usually comes from the keyboard (if no file arguments are given). In technical terms, we say that processes usually write to standard output (the screen) and take their input from standard input (the keyboard). There is in fact another output channel called standard error, where processes write their error messages; by default error messages are also sent to the screen. To redirect standard output to a file instead of the screen, we use the > operator: $ echo hello hello $ echo hello > output $ cat output hello In this case, the contents of the file output will be destroyed if the file already exists. If instead we want to append the output of the echo command to the file, we can use the >> operator: $ echo bye >> output $ cat output hello bye To capture standard error, prefix the > operator with a 2 (in UNIX the file numbers 0, 1 and 2 are assigned to standard input, standard output and standard error respectively), e.g.:
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$ cat nonexistent 2>errors $ cat errors cat: nonexistent: No such file or directory $ You can redirect standard error and standard output to two different files: $ find . -print 1>errors 2>files or to the same file: $ find . -print 1>output 2>output or $ find . -print >& output Standard input can also be redirected using the < operator, so that input is read from a file instead of the keyboard: $ cat < output hello bye You can combine input redirection with output redirection, but be careful not to use the same filename in both places. For example: $ cat < output > output will destroy the contents of the file output. This is because the first thing the shell does when it sees the > operator is to create an empty file ready for the output. One last point to note is that we can pass standard output to system utilities that require filenames as "-": $ cat package.tar.gz | gzip -d | tar tvf Here the output of the gzip
-d

command is used as the input file to the tar command.

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Controlling processes associated with the current shell

Most shells provide sophisticated job control facilities that let you control many running jobs (i.e. processes) at the same time. This is useful if, for example, you are editing a text file and want ot interrupt your editing to do something else. With job control, you can suspend the editor, go back to the shell prompt, and start work on something else. When you are finished, you can switch back to the editor and continue as if you hadn't left. Jobs can either be in the foreground or the background. There can be only one job in the foreground at any time. The foreground job has control of the shell with which you interact - it receives input from the keyboard and sends output to the screen. Jobs in the background do not receive input from the terminal, generally running along quietly without the need for interaction (and drawing it to your attention if they do). The foreground job may be suspended, i.e. temporarily stopped, by pressing the Ctrl-Z key. A suspended job can be made to continue running in the foreground or background as needed by typing "fg" or "bg" respectively. Note that suspending a job is very different from interrupting a job (by pressing the interrupt key, usually Ctrl-C); interrupted jobs are killed off permanently and cannot be resumed. Background jobs can also be run directly from the command line, by appending a '&' character to the command line. For example: $ find / -print 1>output 2>errors & [1] 27501 $ Here the [1] returned by the shell represents the job number of the background process, and the 27501 is the PID of the process. To see a list of all the jobs associated with the current shell, type jobs: $ jobs [1]+ Running $ find / -print 1>output 2>errors &

Note that if you have more than one job you can refer to the job as %n where n is the job number. So for example fg %3 resumes job number 3 in the foreground. To find out the process ID's of the underlying processes associated with the shell and its jobs, use ps (process show): $ ps PID TTY 17717 pts/10 TIME CMD 00:00:00 bash
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27501 pts/10 27502 pts/10

00:00:01 find 00:00:00 ps

So here the PID of the shell (bash) is 17717, the PID of find is 27501 and the PID of ps is 27502. To terminate a process or job abrubtly, use the kill command. kill allows jobs to referred to in two ways - by their PID or by their job number. So $ kill %1 or $ kill 27501 would terminate the find process. Actually kill only sends the process a signal requesting it shutdown and exit gracefully (the SIGTERM signal), so this may not always work. To force a process to terminate abruptly (and with a higher probability of sucess), use a -9 option (the SIGKILL signal):
$ kill -9 27501

can be used to send many other types of signals to running processes. For example a -19 option (SIGSTOP) will suspend a running process. To see a list of such signals, run kill -l.
kill

Controlling other processes

You can also use ps to show all processes running on the machine (not just the processes in your current shell):
$ ps -fae ps -aeH

(or ps

-aux

on BSD machines)

displays a full process hierarchy (including the init process).

Many UNIX versions have a system utility called top that provides an interactive way to monitor system activity. Detailed statistics about currently running processes are displayed and constantly refreshed. Processes are displayed in order of CPU utilization. Useful keys in top are:
s u -

set update frequency display processes of one user

k q

kill process (by PID) - quit

On some systems, the utility w is a non-interactive substitute for top. One other useful process control utility that can be found on most UNIX systems is the pkill command. You can use pkill to kill processes by name instead of PID or job number. So another way to kill off our background find process (along with any another find processes we are running) would be:
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$ pkill find [1]+ Terminated find / -print 1>output 2>errors $ Note that, for obvious security reasons, you can only kill processes that belong to you (unless you are the superuser).

Connecting to Remote Machines

telnet telnet

machinename

provides an insecure mechanism for logging into remote machines. It is insecure because all data (including your username and password) is passed in unencrypted format over the network. For this reason, telnet login access is disabled on most systems and where possible it should be avoided in favour of secure alternatives such as ssh. is still a useful utility, however, because, by specifying different port numbers, telnet can be used to connect to other services offered by remote machines besides remote login (e.g. web pages, email, etc.) and reveal the mechanisms behind how those services are offered. For example,
telnet

$ telnet www.doc.ic.ac.uk 80 Trying 146.169.1.10... Connected to seagull.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.1.10). Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 21:06:34 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) Last-Modified: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 16:09:20 GMT ETag: "23dcfd-3806-3a23d8b0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 14342 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Department of Computing, Imperial College, London: Home Page</TITLE>
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</HEAD> (etc) Here www.doc.ic.ac.uk is the name of the remote machine (in this case the web server for the Department of Computing at Imperial College in London). Like most web servers, it offers web page services on port 80 through the daemon httpd (to see what other services are potentially available on a machine, have a look at the file /etc/services; and to see what services are actually active, see /etc/inetd.conf). By entering a valid HTTP GET command (HTTP is the protocol used to serve web pages) we obtain the top-level home page in HTML format. This is exactly the same process that is used by a web browser to access web pages.

rlogin, rsh and rsh are insecure facilities for logging into remote machines and for executing commands on remote machines respectively. Along with telnet, they have been superseded by ssh.
rlogin

ssh ssh

machinename (secure shell)

is a secure alternative for remote login and also for executing commands in a remote machine. It is intended to replace rlogin and rsh, and provide secure encrypted communications between two untrusted hosts over an insecure network. X11 connections (i.e. graphics) can also be forwarded over the secure channel (another advantage over telnet, rlogin and rsh). ssh is not a standard system utility, although it is a de facto standard. It can be obtained from http://www.ssh.org. A good introduction page giving more background and showing you how to set up ssh is http://www.tac.nyc.ny.us/~kim/ssh/. clients are also available for Windows machines (e.g. there is a good ssh client called putty).
ssh

Network routing utilities

ping

machinename

The ping utility is useful for checking round-trip response time between machines. e.g. $ ping www.doc.ic.ac.uk
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measures the reponse time delay between the current machine and the web server at the Department of Computing at Imperial College. ping is also useful to check whether a machine is still "alive" in some sense.
traceroute traceroute

machinename

shows the full path taken to reach a remote machine, including the delay to each machine along the route. This is particularly useful in tracking down the location of network problems.

Remote File Transfer

ftp ftp

machinename (file transfer protocol)

is an insecure way of transferring files between computers. When you connect to a machine via ftp, you will be asked for your username and password. If you have an account on the machine, you can use it, or you can can often use the user " ftp" or "anonymous". Once logged in via FTP, you can list files (dir), receive files (get and mget) and send files (put and mput). (Unusually for UNIX) help will show you a list of available commands. Particularly useful are binary (transfer files preserving all 8 bits) and prompt n (do not confirm each file on multiple file transfers). Type quit to leave ftp and return to the shell prompt.
scp scp

sourcefiles destination (secure copy)

is a secure way of transferring files between computers. It works just like the UNIX cp command except that the arguments can specify a user and machine as well as files. For example: $ scp [email protected]:~/hello.txt . will (subject to correct authentication) copy the file hello.txt from the user account will on the remote machine rose.doc.ic.ac.uk into the current directory (.) on the local machine.

Other Internet-related utilities

netscape
netscape

is a fully-fledged graphical web browser (like Internet Explorer).

lynx
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lynx wget wget

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provides a way to browse the web on a text-only terminal. URL

provides a way to retrieve files from the web (using the HTTP protocol). wget is non-interactive, which means it can run in the background, while the user is not logged in (unlike most web browsers). The content retrieved by wget is stored as raw HTML text (which can be viewed later using a web browser). Note that netscape, lynx and wget are not standard UNIX system utilities, but are frequently-installed application packages.

User Information and Communication

finger, who

and who show the list of users logged into a machine, the terminal they are using, and the date they logged in on.
finger

$ who will $
write, talk

pts/2

Dec

5 19:41

is used by users on the same machine who want to talk to each other. You should specify the user and (optionally) the terminal they are on:
write

$ write will pts/2 hello will Lines are only transmitted when you press ctrl-d (the UNIX end of file marker).
talk

. To return to the shell prompt, press

is a more sophisticated interactive chat client that can be used between remote machines: $ talk [email protected] Unfortunately because of increasingly tight security restrictions, it is increasingly unlikely that talk will work (this is because it requires a special daemon called talkd to be running on the remote computer). Sometimes an application called ytalk will succeed if talk fails.
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Printer Control
o lpr -Pprintqueue lpr

filename

adds a document to a print queue, so that the document is printed when the printer is available. Look at /etc/printcap to find out what printers are available.
o lpq -Pprintqueue

checks the status of the specified print queue. Each job will have an associated job number.
lpq o lprm -Pprintqueue lprm

jobnumber

removes the given job from the specified print queue.

Note that lpr, lpq and lprm are BSD-style print management utilities. If you are using a strict SYSV UNIX, you may need to use the SYSV equivalents lp, lpstat and cancel.

Email Utilities

mail
mail

is the standard UNIX utility for sending and receiving email. Type ? for help. messages 2 new Dec 11 10:37 "Beanstalks" Dec 11 11:00 "Re: Monica"

$ mail Mail version 8.1 6/6/93. "/var/spool/mail/will": 2 1 [email protected] Mon 2 [email protected] Mon &

Some of the more important commands (type ? for a full list) are given below in Fig. 5.1. Here a messagelist is either a single message specified by a number (e.g. 1) or a range (e.g. 1-2). The special messagelist * matches all messages. ? q x
t

help quit, saving changes to mailbox quit, restoring mailbox to its original state messagelist displays messages
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+/d u m r R

show next/previous message deletes messages undelete messages send a new email reply to sender and other receipients reply only to sender Fig. 5.1: Common mail commands

messagelist messagelist address messagelist messagelist

You can also use mail to send email directly from the command line. For example: $ mail -s "Hi" [email protected] < message.txt $ emails the contents of the (ASCII) file with the subject "Hi".
message.txt

to the recipient

[email protected]

mutt, elm, pine

mutt, elm

and pine are more friendly (but non-standard) email interfaces that you will probably prefer to use instead of mail. All have good in-built help facilities.

sendmail, exim Email is actually sent using an Email Transfer Agent, which uses a protocol called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). The two most popular Email Transfer Agents are sendmail and exim. You can see how these agents work by using telnet to connect to port 25 of any mail server, for example: $ telnet mail.doc.ic.ac.uk 25 Trying 146.169.1.47... Connected to diver.doc.ic.ac.uk (146.169.1.47). Escape character is '^]'. 220 diver.doc.ic.ac.uk ESMTP Exim 3.16 #7 HELP 214-Commands supported: 214HELO EHLO MAIL RCPT DATA AUTH 214 NOOP QUIT RSET HELP MAIL FROM: [email protected] 250 <[email protected]> is syntactically correct RCPT TO: [email protected] 250 <[email protected]> verified
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DATA 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line Hi This is a message from an alien . 250 OK id=145UqB-0002t6-00 QUIT 221 diver.doc.ic.ac.uk closing connection Connection closed by foreign host. $ This sends an email to [email protected], apparently from [email protected]. Email advertisers (aka spammers) often use this technique to attempt to confuse recipients as to the true source of messages. Fortunately exim and sendmail include extensive header information when they forward email, including the IP address of the computer from where the message was sent.

Advanced Text File Processing

sed sed

(stream editor)

allows you to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (i.e. a file or input from a pipeline). For example, you can delete lines containing particular string of text, or you can substitute one pattern for another wherever it occurs in a file. Although sed is a mini-programming language all on its own and can execute entire scripts, its full language is obscure and probably best forgotten (being based on the old and esoteric UNIX line editor ed). sed is probably at its most useful when used directly from the command line with simple parameters:
$ sed "s/pattern1/pattern2/"

inputfile > outputfile (substitutes pattern2 for pattern1 once per line)
$ sed "s/pattern1/pattern2/g"

inputfile > outputfile (substitutes pattern2 for pattern1 for every pattern1 per line)
$ sed "/pattern1/d"

inputfile > outputfile (deletes all lines containing pattern1)

$ sed "y/string1/string2/"

inputfile > outputfile (substitutes characters in string2 for those in string1)

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awk awk

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(Aho, Weinberger and Kernigan)

is useful for manipulating files that contain columns of data on a line by line basis. Like sed, you can either pass awk statements directly on the command line, or you can write a script file and let awk read the commands from the script. Say we have a file of cricket scores called cricket.dat containing columns for player number, name, runs and the way in which they were dismissed: 1 2 3 4 5 atherton hussain stewart thorpe gough 0 20 47 33 6 bowled caught stumped lbw run-out

To print out only the first and second columns we can say: $ awk '{ print $1 " " $2 }' cricket.dat atherton 0 hussain 20 stewart 47 thorpe 33 gough 6 $ Here $n stands for the nth field or column of each line in the data file. $0 can be used to denote the whole line. We can do much more with awk. For example, we can write a script cricket.awk to calculate the team's batting average and to check if Mike Atherton got another duck: $ cat > cricket.awk BEGIN { players = 0; runs = 0 } { players++; runs +=$3 } /atherton/ { if (runs==0) print "atherton duck!" } END { print "the batting average is " runs/players } (ctrl-d) $ awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat atherton duck! the batting average is 21.2 $ The BEGIN clause is executed once at the start of the script, the main clause once for every line, the /atherton/ clause only if the word atherton occurs in the line and the END clause once at the end of the script.
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awk

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awk).

can do a lot more. See the manual pages for details (type man

Target Directed Compilation

make is a utility which can determine automatically which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issue the commands to recompile them. To use make, you need to create a file called Makefile or makefile that describes the relationships among files in your program, and the states the commands for updating each file.
make

Here is an example of a simple makefile: scores.out: cricket.awk cricket.dat [TAB]awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out Here [TAB] indicates the TAB key. The interpretation of this makefile is as follows:
o o o

is the target of the compilation scores.out depends on cricket.awk and cricket.dat if either cricket.awk or cricket.dat have been modified since scores.out was last modified or if scores.out does not exist, update scores.out by executing the command:
scores.out

awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out make is invoked simply by typing $ make awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out $ Since scores.out did not exist, make executed the commands to create it. If we now invoke make again, nothing happens: $ make make: `scores.out' is up to date. $ But if we modify cricket.dat and then run make again, scores.out will be updated:
$ touch cricket.dat

(touch simulates file modification)

$ make
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awk -f cricket.awk cricket.dat > scores.out $ is mostly used when compiling large C, C++ or Java programs, but can (as we have seen) be used to automatically and intelligently produce a target file of any kind.
make

Version control with CVS

cvs cvs

(Concurrent Versioning System)

is a source code control system often used on large programming projects to control the concurrent editing of source files by multiple authors. It keeps old versions of files and maintains a log of when, and why changes occurred, and who made them. keeps a single copy of the master sources. This copy is called the source ``repository''; it contains all the information to permit extracting previous software releases at any time based on either a symbolic revision tag, or a date in the past.
cvs

has a large number of commands (type info cvs for a full cvs tutorial, including how to set up a repository from scratch or from existing code). The most useful commands are:
cvs o cvs checkout

modules

This gives you a private copy of source code that you can work on with without interfering with others.
o cvs update

This updates the code you have checked out, to reflect any changes that have subsequently been made by other developers. cvs add files You can use this to add new files into a repository that you have checked-out. Does not actually affect the repository until a "cvs commit" is performed. cvs remove files Removes files from a checked-out repository. Doesn't affect the repository until a "cvs commit" is performed. cvs commit files This command publishes your changes to other developers by updating the source code in the central repository.
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C/C++ compilation utilities

cc, gcc, CC, g++ UNIX installations usually come with a C and/or C++ compiler. The C compiler is usually called cc or gcc, and the C++ compiler is usually called CC or g++. Most large C or C++ programs will come with a makefile and will support the configure utility, so that compiling and installing a package is often as simple as: $ ./configure $ make $ make install However, there is nothing to prevent you from writing and compiling a simple C program yourself: $ cat > hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("hello world!\n"); return 0; } (ctrl-d) $ cc hello.c -o hello $ ./hello hello world! $ Here the C compiler (cc) takes as input the C source file hello.c and produces as output an executable program called hello. The program hello may then be executed (the ./ tells the shell to look in the current directory to find the hello program).

Manual Pages

man More information is available on most UNIX commands is available via the online manual pages, which are accessible through the man command. The online documentation is in fact divided into sections. Traditionally, they are
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

User-level commands System calls Library functions Devices and device drivers File formats Games Various miscellaneous stuff - macro packages etc. System maintenance and operation commands

Sometimes man gives you a manual page from the wrong section. For example, say you were writing a program and you needed to use the rmdir system call. man rmdir gives you the manual page for the user-level command rmdir. To force man to look in Section 2 of the manual instead, type man 2 rmdir (orman -s2 rmdir on some systems). can also find manual pages which mention a particular topic. For example, man postscript should produce a list of utilities that can produce and manipulate postscript files.
man -k

info is an interactive, somewhat more friendly and helpful alternative to man. It may not be installed on all systems, however.
info

Introduction to vi
(pronounced "vee-eye", short for visual, or perhaps vile) is a display-oriented text editor based on an underlying line editor called ex. Although beginners usually find vi somewhat awkward to use, it is useful to learn because it is universally available (being supplied with all UNIX systems). It also uses standard alphanumeric keys for commands, so it can be used on almost any terminal or workstation without having to worry about unusual keyboard mappings. System administrators like users to use vi because it uses very few system resources.
vi

To start vi, enter:

$ vi

filename

where filename is the name of the file you want to edit. If the file doesn't exist, vi will create it for you.

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Basic Text Input and Navigation in vi

The main feature that makes vi unique as an editor is its mode-based operation. vi has two modes: command mode and input mode. In command mode, characters you type perform actions (e.g. moving the cursor, cutting or copying text, etc.) In input mode, characters you type are inserted or overwrite existing text. When you begin vi, it is in command mode. To put vi into input mode, press i (insert). You can then type text which is inserted at the current cursor location; you can correct mistakes with the backspace key as you type.To get back into command mode, press ESC (the escape key). Another way of inserting text, especially useful when you are at the end of a line is to press a (append). In command mode, you are able to move the cursor around your document. h, j, k and l move the cursor left, down, up and right respectively (if you are lucky the arrow keys may also work). Other useful keys are ^ and $ which move you to the beginning and end of a line respectively. w skips to the beginning of the next word and b skips back to the beginning of the previous word. To go right to the top of the document, press 1 and then G. To go the bottom of the document, press G. To skip forward a page, press ^F, and to go back a page, press ^B. To go to a particular line number, type the line number and press G, e.g. 55G takes you to line 55. To delete text, move the cursor over the first character of the group you want to delete and make sure you are in command mode. Press x to delete the current character, dw to delete the next word, d4w to delete the next 4 words, dd to delete the next line, 4dd to delete the next 4 lines, d$ to delete to the end of the line or even dG to delete to the end of the document. If you accidentally delete too much, pressing u will undo the last change. Occasionally you will want to join two lines together. Press J to do this (trying to press backspace on the beginning of the second line does not have the intuitive effect!)

Moving and Copying Text in vi

uses buffers to store text that is deleted. There are nine numbered buffers (1-9) as well as the undo buffer. Usually buffer 1 contains the most recent deletion, buffer 2 the next recent, etc.
vi

To cut and paste in vi, delete the text (using e.g. 5dd to delete 5 lines). Then move to the line where you want the text to appear and press p. If you delete something else before you paste, you can still retrieve the delete text by pasting the contents of the delete buffers. You can do this by typing "1p, "2p, etc. To copy and paste, "yank" the text (using e.g. 5yy to copy 5 lines). Then move to the line where you want the text to appear and press p.

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Searching for and Replacing Text in vi

In command mode, you can search for text by specifying regular expressions. To search forward, type / and then a regular expression and press . To search backwards, begin with a ? instead of a /. To find the next text that matches your regular expression press n. To search and replace all occurences of pattern1 with pattern2, type :%s/pattern1/pattern2/g . To be asked to confirm each replacement, add a c to this substitution command. Instead of the % you can also give a range of lines (e.g. 1,17) over which you want the substitution to apply.

Other Useful vi Commands

Programmers might like the :set nonumber turns them off). To save a file, type :w saving type :q! .
number

command which displays line numbers (:set or press ZZ. To force a quit without

. To save and quit, type :wq .

To start editing another file, type :e filename

To execute shell commands from within vi, and then return to vi afterwards, type :!shellcommand . You can use the letter % as a substitute for the name of the file that you are editing (so :!echo % prints the name of the current file).
.

repeats the last command.

Quick reference for vi

Inserting and typing text: i insert text (and enter input mode) $a append text (to end of line) ESC re-enter command mode J join lines Cursor movement: h left j down k up l right ^ beginning of line $ end of line 1 G top of document G end of document <n> G go to line <n>
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^F ^B w b

page page word word

forward backward forwards backwards

Deleting and moving text: Backspace delete character before cursor (only works in insert mode) x delete character under cursor dw delete word dd delete line (restore with p or P) <n> dd delete n lines d$ delete to end of line dG delete to end of file yy yank/copy line (restore with p or P) <n> yy yank/copy <n> lines Search and replace: %s/<search string>/<replace string>/g Miscellaneous: u undo :w save :wq save ZZ save :q! quit

file file and quit file and quit without saving

Introduction to emacs
is a popular editor for UNIX, Windows and Macintosh systems. Unlike vi, it is not a standard UNIX system utility, but is available from the Free Software Foundation.
emacs

An emacs zealot will tell you how emacs provides advanced facilities that go beyond simple insertion and deletion of text: you can view two are more files at the same time, compile and debug programs in almost any programming language, typeset documents, run shell commands, read manual pages, email and news and even browse the web from inside emacs. emacs is also very flexible - you can redefine keystrokes and commands easily, and (for the more ambitious) you can even write Lisp programs to add new commands and display modes to emacs, since emacs has its own Lisp interpreter. In fact most of the editing commands of Emacs are written in Lisp already; the few exceptions are written in C for efficiency. However, users do not need to know how to program Lisp to use emacs (while it is true that only a programmer can write a substantial extension to emacs, it is easy for anyone to use it afterwards).

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Critics of emacs point out that it uses a relatively large amount of system resources compared to vi and that it has quite a complicated command structure (joking that emacs stands for Escape-MetaAlt-Control-Shift). In practice most users tend to use both editors - vi to quickly edit short scripts and programs and emacs for more complex jobs that require reference to more than one file simultaneously. On UNIX systems, emacs can run in graphical mode under the X Windows system, in which case some helpful menus and mouse button command mappings are provided. However, most of its facilities are also available on a text terminal. To start emacs, enter:
$ emacs

filename

where filename is the name of the file you want to edit. If the file doesn't exist, emacs will create it for you.

Basic Text Input and Navigation in emacs

Text input and navigation in emacs is mostly a matter of using the arrow keys to position the cursor and typing some text. Issuing more complex emacs commands usually involves pressing the Ctrl key (sometimes also labelled Control or Ctl) or the Meta key (sometimes also labelled Alt). emacs commands are usually described in this way:

means hold the Ctrl key while typing the character <chr>. Thus, C-f would be: hold the Ctrl key and type f. M-<chr> means hold the Meta or Alt key down while typing <chr>. If there is no Meta or Alt key, instead press and release the ESC key and then type <chr>.
C-<chr>

One initially annoying feature of emacs is that its help facility has been installed on C-h (Ctrl h). Unfortunately this is also the code for the backspace key on most systems. You can, however, easily make the key work as expected by creating a .emacs file (a file always read on start up) in your home directory containing the following line: (global-set-key "\C-h" 'backward-delete-char-untabify) Here is a .emacs file that contains this line as well as several other useful facilities (see Section 6.3.6). To access the help system you can still type M-x help-with-tutorial .
help

or (for a comprehensive tutorial) M-x

Useful navigation commands are C-a (beginning of line), C-e (end of line), C-v (forward page), M-v (backwards page), M-< (beginning of document) and M-> (end of document). C-d will delete the character under the cursor, while C-k will delete to the end of the line. Text deleted with C-k is placed in a buffer which can be "yanked" back later with C-y.
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Moving and Copying Text in emacs

The easiest way to cut and paste text is to go to the start of the text and press C-k until you have deleted the text you want. Then move to the spot where you want to paste the text and press C-y to restore the text. If you make a mistake, C-u will undo the change (emacs supports several levels of undo). Another way to delete a chunk of text is to go the start of the text and press C-SPC (SPC is the spacebar; this sets a mark). Then go to the end of the text you wish to delete and press C-w. Restore the text in the right spot with C-y. To copy and paste, delete the target text as above, and then use C-y twice (once to restore the original text, and once to create the copy).

Searching for and Replacing Text in emacs

To search forwards and backwards incrementally, use C-s and C-r respectively. Pressing C-s or C-r again will repeat the operation. When you have found the text you want, press , or press C-g to cancel the operation and return your cursor to the position where the search started. To replace a string, type M-x replace-string (you may want to modify your .emacs file so that this command is on C-x r). M-% performs a query search and replace.

Other Useful emacs Commands

Pressing C-g will cancel any emacs command in progress. To save a file, press C-x
C-s.

To start editing a new file, press C-x

C-f.

To bring up two windows (or "buffers" in emacs-speak), press C-x 2 (C-x 1 gets you back to 1). C-x o switches between buffers on the same screen. C-x b lets you switch between all active buffers, whether you can see them or not. C-x C-k deletes a buffer that you are finished with. brings up a UNIX shell inside a buffer (you may like to put this on C-x C-u). M-x goto-line skips to a particular line (you may like to put this on C-x g). M-x compile will attempt to compile a program (using the make utility or some other command that you can specify). If you are doing a lot of programming you will probably want to put this on a key like C-x c.
M-x shell M-q

will reformat a paragraph. quits emacs.

C-x C-c

Quick reference for emacs

Cursor movement: C-a beginning of line C-e end of line
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C-< top of document C-> end of document M-x goto-line Go to line C-v page forward M-v page backward Deleting and moving text: Backspace delete character before cursor (subject to modification of .emacs) C-d delete character under cursor M-d delete word C-k delete to end of line(s) (restore with C-y) C-SPC set mark C-w delete from mark to cursor (restore with C-y) Search and replace: C-s incremental search forward C-r incremental search backward C-% query replace M-x replace-string <searchstr> <replstr> Miscellaneous: C-x u C-x C-s C-x C-f C-x 2 C-x 1 C-x o C-x b M-q C-x C-c undo save file find file 2 windows 1 window switch between windows switch buffers reformat paragraph quit

Useful customisable keys (configured using the provided .emacs file): C-x g goto line C-x c compile program (useful with C-x 2) C-x C-u open Unix shell (useful with C-x 2) C-x a repeat command C-x m manual entry

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Other UNIX editors

There are many other editors for UNIX systems. Two popular alternatives to vi and emacs are nedit and pico.

The Superuser root

The superuser is a privileged user who has unrestricted access to all commands and files on a system regardless of their permissions. The superuser's login is usually root. Access to the root account is restricted by a password (the root password). Because the root account has huge potential for destruction, the root password should be chosen carefully, only given to those who need it, and changed regularly. One way to become root is to log in as usual using the username root and the root password (usually security measures are in place so that this is only possible if you are using a "secure" console and not connecting over a network). Using root as your default login in this way is not recommended, however, because normal safeguards that apply to other user accounts do not apply to root. Consequently using root for mundane tasks often results in a memory lapse or misplaced keystrokes having catastrophic effects (e.g. forgetting for a moment which directory you are in and accidentally deleting another user's files, or accidentally typing "rm -rf * .txt" instead of "rm -rf *.txt" ). A better way to become root is to use the su utility. su (switch user) lets you become another user (at least as far as the computer is concerned). If you don't specify the name of the user you wish to become, the system will assume you want to become root. Using su does not usually change your current directory, unless you specify a "-" option which will run the target user's startup scripts and change into their home directory (provided you can supply the right password of course). So: $ su Password: xxxxxxxx # Note that the root account often displays a different prompt (usually a #). To return to your old self, simply type "exit" at the shell prompt. You should avoid leaving a root window open while you are not at your machine. Consider this paragraph from a humorous 1986 Computer Language article by Alan Filipski: "The prudent administrator should be aware of common techniques used to breach UNIX security. The most widely known and practised attack on the security of the UNIX brand operating system is elegant in its simplicity. The perpetrator simply hangs around the system console until the operator leaves to get a drink or go to the bathroom. The intruder lunges for the console and types rm -rf / before anyone can pry his or her hands off the keyboard. Amateur efforts are characterised by

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typing in things such as ls or pwd. A skilled UNIX brand operating system security expert would laugh at such attempts."

Shutdown and System Start-up

Shutdown:

(in /sbin) /sbin/shutdown allows a UNIX system to shut down gracefully and securely. All logged-in users are notified that the system is going down, and new logins are blocked. It is possible to shut the system down immediately or after a specified delay and to specify what should happen after the system has been shut down: (shut down now and reboot) # /sbin/shutdown -h +5 (shut down in 5 minutes & halt) # /sbin/shutdown -k 17:00 (fake a shutdown at 5pm)
# /sbin/shutdown -r now halt

shutdown, halt, reboot

and

reboot

are equivalent to

shutdown -h

and

shutdown -r

respectively.

If you have to shut a system down extremely urgently or for some reason cannot use shutdown, it is at least a good idea to first run the command: # sync which forces the state of the file system to be brought up to date.

System startup: At system startup, the operating system performs various low-level tasks, such as initialising the memory system, loading up device drivers to communicate with hardware devices, mounting filesystems and creating the init process (the parent of all processes). init's primary responsibility is to start up the system services as specified in /etc/inittab. Typically these services include gettys (i.e. virtual terminals where users can login), and the scripts in the directory /etc/rc.d/init.d which usually spawn high-level daemons such as httpd (the web server). On most UNIX systems you can type dmesg to see system startup messages, or look in /var/log/messages. If a mounted filesystem is not "clean" (e.g. the machine was turned off without shutting down properly), a system utility fsck is automatically run to repair it. Automatic running can only fix certain errors, however, and you may have to run it manually: # fsck filesys where filesys is the name of a device (e.g. /dev/hda1) or a mount point (like /). "Lost" files recovered during this process end up in the lost+found directory. Some more modern filesystems called "journaling" file systems don't require fsck, since they keep
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extensive logs of filesystem events and are able to recover in a similar way to a transactional database.

Adding Users
useradd useradd

(in /usr/sbin):

is a utility for adding new users to a UNIX system. It adds new user information to the /etc/passwd file and creates a new home directory for the user. When you add a new user, you should also set their password (using the -p option on useradd, or using the passwd utility): # useradd bob # passwd bob

Controlling User Groups

groupadd groupadd

(in /usr/sbin): creates a new user group and adds the new information to /etc/group: groupname

# groupadd usermod

(in /usr/sbin):Every user belongs to a primary group and possibly also to a set of supplementary groups. To modify the group permissions of an existing user, use
# usermod -g

initialgroup username

-G

othergroups

where othergroups is a list of supplementary group names separated by commas (with no intervening whitespace).

groups You can find out which groups a user belongs to by typing:
# groups

username

Reconfiguring and Recompiling the Linux Kernel

Linux has a modular, customisable kernel with several switchable options (e.g. support for multiple processors and device drivers for various hardware devices). It may happen that some new hardware is added to a Linux machine which requires you to recompile the kernel so that it includes
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device driver support (and possibly new system calls) for the new hardware. To do this, you will need to rebuild the Linux kernel from scratch as follows:

Look in /usr/src/linux for the kernel source code. If it isn't there (or if there is just a message saying that only kernel binaries have been installed), get hold of a copy of the latest kernel source code from http://www.kernel.org and untar it into /usr/src/linux. Change directory to /usr/src/linux. To configure the kernel type either
# make config # make # make

(simple text mode configuration), or menuconfig (menu-driven text configuration), or xconfig (graphical configuration for X)

You will be asked to select which modules (device drivers, multiprocessor support etc.) you wish to include. For each module, you can chose to include it in the kernel code (y), incorporate it as an optional module that will be loaded if needed (m) or to exclude it from the kernel code (n). To find out which optional modules have actually been loaded you can run lsmod when the system reboots.

Now type:
# make dep # make # make # make

# make clean

(to build source code dependencies) (to delete all stale object files) bzImage (to build the new kernel) modules (to build the new optional modules) modules_install (to install the modules)

The file /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage now contains your new kernel image. It remains only to install it.

Change directory to /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot. In the same directory should be a script called install.sh which will copy your kernel image into /boot/vmlinuz:
# install.sh

version

bzImage /boot/System.map /boot

where version is the kernel version number (of form 2.2.xx).

Finally, you may need to update the /etc/lilo.conf file so that lilo (the Linux boot loader) includes an entry for your new kernel. Then run # lilo

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to update the changes. When you reboot your machine, you should be able to select your new kernel image from the lilo boot loader.

Cron Jobs
is a daemon that executes commands that need to be run regularly according to some schedule. The schedule and corresponding commands are stored in the file /etc/crontab.
crond

Each entry in the /etc/crontab file entry contains six fields separated by spaces or tabs in the following form: minute hour day_of_month month weekday command These fields accept the following values:
minute 0 through 59

hour day_of_month month weekday command

0 1 1 0 a

through 23 through 31 through 12 (Sun) through 6 (Sat) shell command

You must specify a value for each field. Except for the command field, these fields can contain the following:

A number in the specified range, e.g. to run a command in May, specify 5 in the month field. Two numbers separated by a dash to indicate an inclusive range, e.g. to run a cron job on Tuesday through Friday, place 2-5 in the weekday field. A list of numbers separated by commas, e.g. to run a command on the first and last day of January, you would specify 1,31 in the day_of_month field. * (asterisk), meaning all allowed values, e.g. to run a job every hour, specify an asterisk in the hour field.

You can also specify some execution environment options at the top of the /etc/crontab file: SHELL=/bin/bash PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin MAILTO=root To run the calendar command at 6:30am. every Mon, Wed, and Fri, a suitable /etc/crontab entry would be: 30 6 * * 1,3,5 /usr/bin/calendar
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The output of the command will be mailed to the user specified in the MAILTO environment option. You don't need to restart the cron daemon crond after changing /etc/crontab - it automatically detects changes.

Keeping Essential Processes Alive

It is important that daemons related to mission critical services are immediately respawned if they fail for some reason. You can do this by adding your own entries to the /etc/inittab file. For example: rs:2345:respawn:/home/sms/server/RingToneServer Here rs is a 2 character code identifying the service, and 2345 are the runlevels (to find about runlevels, type man runlevel) for which the process should be created. The init process will create the RingToneServer process at system startup, and respawn it should it die for any reason.

Shells and Shell Scripts

A shell is a program which reads and executes commands for the user. Shells also usually provide features such job control, input and output redirection and a command language for writing shell scripts. A shell script is simply an ordinary text file containing a series of commands in a shell command language (just like a "batch file" under MS-DOS). There are many different shells available on UNIX systems (e.g. sh, bash, csh, ksh, tcsh etc.), and they each support a different command language. Here we will discuss the command language for the Bourne shell sh since it is available on almost all UNIX systems (and is also supported under bash and ksh).

Shell Variables and the Environment

A shell lets you define variables (like most programming languages). A variable is a piece of data that is given a name. Once you have assigned a value to a variable, you access its value by prepending a $ to the name: $ bob='hello world' $ echo $bob hello world $ Variables created within a shell are local to that shell, so only that shell can access them. The set command will show you a list of all variables currently defined in a shell. If you wish a variable to be accessible to commands outside the shell, you can export it into the environment:
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$ export bob (under csh you used setenv). The environment is the set of variables that are made available to commands (including shells) when they are executed. UNIX commands and programs can read the values of environment variables, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. For example, the environment variable PAGER is used by the man command (and others) to see what command should be used to display multiple pages. If you say: $ export PAGER=cat and then try the man command (say man now say: $ export PAGER=more normal service should be resumed (since now more will be used to display the pages one at a time). Another environment variable that is commonly used is the EDITOR variable which specifies the default editor to use (so you can set this to vi or emacs or which ever other editor you prefer). To find out which environment variables are used by a particular command, consult the man pages for that command. Another interesting environment variable is PS1, the main shell prompt string which you can use to create your own custom prompt. For example: $ export PS1="(\h) \w> " (lumberjack) ~> The shell often incorporates efficient mechanisms for specifying common parts of the shell prompt (e.g. in bash you can use \h for the current host, \w for the current working directory, \d for the date, \t for the time, \u for the current user and so on - see the bash man page). Another important environment variable is PATH. PATH is a list of directories that the shell uses to locate executable files for commands. So if the PATH is set to: /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:. and you typed ls, the shell would look for /bin/ls, /usr/bin/ls etc. Note that the PATH contains'.', i.e. the current working directory. This allows you to create a shell script or program and run it as a command from your current directory without having to explicitly say " ./filename". Note that PATH has nothing to with filenames that are specified as arguments to commands (e.g. cat myfile.txt would only look for ./myfile.txt, not for /bin/myfile.txt, /usr/bin/myfile.txt etc.)
pwd),

the page will go flying past without stopping. If you

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Simple Shell Scripting

Consider the following simple shell script, which has been created (using an editor) in a text file called simple: #!/bin/sh # this is a comment echo "The number of arguments is $#" echo "The arguments are $*" echo "The first is $1" echo "My process number is $$" echo "Enter a number from the keyboard: " read number echo "The number you entered was $number" The shell script begins with the line "#!/bin/sh" . Usually "#" denotes the start of a comment, but #! is a special combination that tells UNIX to use the Bourne shell ( sh) to interpret this script. The #! must be the first two characters of the script. The arguments passed to the script can be accessed through $1, $2, $3 etc. $* stands for all the arguments, and $# for the number of arguments. The process number of the shell executing the script is given by $$. the read number statement assigns keyboard input to the variable number. To execute this script, we first have to make the file simple executable: $ ls -l simple -rw-r--r-1 will finance 175 $ chmod +x simple $ ls -l simple -rwxr-xr-x 1 will finance 175 $ ./simple hello world The number of arguments is 2 The arguments are hello world The first is hello My process number is 2669 Enter a number from the keyboard: 5 The number you entered was 5 $ Dec 13 Dec 13 simple simple

We can use input and output redirection in the normal way with scripts, so: $ echo 5 | simple hello world would produce similar output but would not pause to read a number from the keyboard.
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More Advanced Shell Scripting

if-then-else

statements

Shell scripts are able to perform simple conditional branches: test ] then commands-if-test-is-true else commands-if-test-is-false fi
if [

The test condition may involve file characteristics or simple string or numerical comparisons. The [ used here is actually the name of a command (/bin/[) which performs the evaluation of the test condition. Therefore there must be spaces before and after it as well as before the closing bracket. Some common test conditions are: file true if file exists and is not empty -f file true if file is an ordinary file -d file true if file is a directory -r file true if file is readable -w file true if file is writable -x file true if file is executable $X -eq $Y true if X equals Y $X -ne $Y true if X not equal to Y $X -lt $Y true if X less than $Y $X -gt $Y true if X greater than $Y $X -le $Y true if X less than or equal to Y $X -ge $Y true if X greater than or equal to Y "$A" = "$B"
-s

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true if string A equals string B "$A" != "$B" true if string A not equal to string B $X ! -gt $Y true if string X is not greater than Y $E -a $F true if expressions E and F are both true $E -o $F true if either expression E or expression
for

is true

loops

Sometimes we want to loop through a list of files, executing some commands on each file. We can do this by using a for loop:
for

variable

in

list

do statements (referring to $variable) done The following script sorts each text files in the current directory: #!/bin/sh for f in *.txt do echo sorting file $f cat $f | sort > $f.sorted echo sorted file has been output to $f.sorted done
while

loops

Another form of loop is the while loop:

while [

test

do statements done (to be executed while test is true)

The following script waits until a non-empty file input.txt has been created: #!/bin/sh while [ ! -s input.txt ] do
57

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UNIX/LINUX

MCA

echo waiting... sleep 5 done echo input.txt is ready You can abort a shell script at any point using the exit statement, so the following script is equivalent: #!/bin/sh while true do if [ -s input.txt ] echo input.txt is ready exit fi echo waiting... sleep 5 done
case case

statements

statements are a convenient way to perform multiway branches where one input pattern must be compared to several alternatives: variable in pattern1) statement ;; pattern2) statement ;; etc. esac
case

(executed if variable matches pattern1)

The following script uses a case statement to have a guess at the type of non-directory non-executable files passed as arguments on the basis of their extensions (note how the "or" operator | can be used to denote multiple patterns, how "*" has been used as a catch-all, and the effect of the forward single quotes `): #!/bin/sh for f in $* do if [ -f $f -a ! -x $f ] then
58

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MCA

case $f in core) echo "$f: a core dump file" ;; *.c) echo "$f: a C program" ;; *.cpp|*.cc|*.cxx) echo "$f: a C++ program" ;; *.txt) echo "$f: a text file" ;; *.pl) echo "$f: a PERL script" ;; *.html|*.htm) echo "$f: a web document" ;; *) echo "$f: appears to be "`file -b $f` ;; esac fi done

capturing command output Any UNIX command or program can be executed from a shell script just as if you would on the line command line. You can also capture the output of a command and assign it to a variable by using the forward single quotes ` `: #!\bin\sh lines=`wc -l $1` echo "the file $1 has $lines lines" This script outputs the number of lines in the file passed as the first parameter.

arithmetic operations The Bourne shell doesn't have any built-in ability to evaluate simple mathematical expressions. Fortunately the UNIX expr command is available to do this. It is frequently used in shell scripts with forward single quotes to update the value of a variable. For example:
59

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UNIX/LINUX

MCA

lines = `expr $lines + 1` adds 1 to the variable lines. expr supports the operators +, -, *, /, % (remainder), <, <=, =, !=, >=, >, | (or) and & (and).

Start-up Shell Scripts

When you first login to a shell, your shell runs a systemwide start-up script (usually called /etc/profile under sh, bash and ksh and /etc/.login under csh). It then looks in your home directory and runs your personal start-up script (.profile under sh, bash and ksh and .cshrc under csh and tcsh). Your personal start-up script is therefore usually a good place to set up environment variables such as PATH, EDITOR etc. For example with bash, to add the directory ~/bin to your PATH, you can include the line: export PATH=$PATH:~/bin in your .profile. If you subsequently modify your .profile and you wish to import the changes into your current shell, type: $ source .profile or $ . ./profile The source command is built into the shell. It ensures that changes to the environment made in .profile affect the current shell, and not the shell that would otherwise be created to execute the .profile script.With csh, to add the directory ~/bin to your PATH, you can include the line: set path = ( $PATH $HOME/bin ) in your .cshrc.

60

NRI-IT COMMAND APROPOS WHATIS MAN -T ASCII | PS2PDF - > ASCII.PDF

WHICH COMMAND TIME COMMAND

UNIX/LINUX DESCRIPTION

MCA

SHOW COMMANDS PERTINENT TO STRING. SEE ALSO

THREADSAFE MAKE A PDF OF A MANUAL PAGE

SHOW FULL PATH NAME OF COMMAND SEE HOW LONG A COMMAND TAKES START STOPWATCH . CTRL-D TO STOP. SEE ALSO SW GO TO PREVIOUS DIRECTORY GO TO $HOME DIRECTORY GO TO DIR, EXECUTE COMMAND AND RETURN TO
CURRENT DIR

TIME CAT
DIR NAVIGATION

CD CD (CD DIR && COMMAND) PUSHD .

FILE SEARCHING

PUT CURRENT DIR ON STACK SO YOU CAN POPD BACK

TO IT

ALIAS L='LS -L --COLOR=AUTO ' LS -LRT LS /USR/BIN | PR -T9 -W$COLUMNS

FIND -NAME '*.[ CH]' | XARGS GREP -E 'EXPR' FIND -TYPE F -PRINT 0 | XARGS -R0 GREP -F 'EXAMPLE' FIND -MAXDEPTH 1 -TYPE F | XARGS GREP -F ' EXAMPLE ' FIND -MAXDEPTH 1 -TYPE D | WHILE READ DIR; DO ECHO $DIR; ECHO CMD2; DONE

QUICK DIR LISTING

LIST FILES BY DATE . SEE ALSO NEWEST AND FIND _MM_YYYY PRINT IN 9 COLUMNS TO WIDTH OF TERMINAL SEARCH 'EXPR' IN THIS DIR AND BELOW. SEE ALSO
FINDREPO

SEARCH ALL REGULAR FILES FOR 'EXAMPLE ' IN THIS DIR

AND BELOW

SEARCH ALL REGULAR FILES FOR 'EXAMPLE ' IN THIS DIR PROCESS EACH ITEM WITH MULTIPLE COMMANDS (IN WHILE LOOP ) FIND FILES NOT READABLE BY ALL (USEFUL FOR WEB SITE ) FIND DIRS NOT ACCESSIBLE BY ALL (USEFUL FOR WEB SITE ) SEARCH CACHED INDEX FOR NAMES. THIS RE IS LIKE GLOB *FILE *.TXT Q UICKLY SEARCH (SORTED) DICTIONARY FOR PREFIX HIGHLIGHT OCCURANCES OF REGULAR EXPRESSION IN
DICTIONARY

FIND -TYPE F ! -PERM -444 FIND -TYPE D ! -PERM -111 LOCATE -R 'FILE [^/]*\.TXT' LOOK REFERENCE GREP --COLOR REFERENCE /USR/SHARE /DICT /WORDS
ARCHIVES AND COMPRESSION GPG -C FILE GPG FILE .GPG TAR -C DIR/ | BZIP2 > DIR.TAR.BZ2 BZIP2 -DC DIR.TAR.BZ2 | TAR -X

ENCRYPT FILE DECRYPT FILE MAKE COMPRESSED ARCHIVE OF DIR/ EXTRACT ARCHIVE (USE GZIP INSTEAD OF BZIP2 FOR 61

NRI-IT

UNIX/LINUX
TAR.GZ FILES )

MCA MAKE ENCRYPTED ARCHIVE OF DIR/ ON REMOTE

MACHINE

TAR -C DIR/ | GZIP | GPG -C | SSH USER@REMOTE 'DD OF=DIR.TAR.GZ.GPG' FIND DIR/ -NAME '*.TXT ' | TAR -C --FILES -FROM=- | BZIP2 > DIR_TXT .TAR.BZ2 FIND DIR/ -NAME '*.TXT ' | XARGS CP -A --TARGET -DIRECTORY =DIR_TXT / --PARENTS

MAKE ARCHIVE OF SUBSET OF DIR/ AND BELOW MAKE COPY OF SUBSET OF DIR/ AND BELOW COPY (WITH PERMISSIONS ) COPY/ DIR TO /WHERE /TO/
DIR

( TAR -C /DIR/TO/COPY ) | ( CD /WHERE /TO / && TAR -X -P ) ( CD /DIR/TO /COPY && TAR -C . ) | ( CD /WHERE /TO/ && TAR -X -P ) ( TAR -C /DIR/TO/COPY ) | SSH -C USER@REMOTE 'CD /WHERE /TO/ && TAR -X -P'
DD BS =1M IF=/ DEV/ SDA | GZIP | SSH USER@REMOTE 'DD OF=SDA.GZ'

COPY (WITH PERMISSIONS ) CONTENTS OF COPY / DIR TO /WHERE /TO/ COPY (WITH PERMISSIONS ) COPY/ DIR TO REMOTE:/ WHERE/ TO / DIR BACKUP HARDDISK TO REMOTE MACHINE ONLY GET DIFFS . DO MULTIPLE TIMES FOR
TROUBLESOME DOWNLOADS

RSYNC (NETWORK EFFICIENT FILE COPIER: USE THE --DRY -RUN OPTION FOR TESTING) RSYNC -P RSYNC:// RSYNC.SERVER.COM/ PATH / TO / FILE FILE RSYNC --BWLIMIT =1000 FROMFILE TOFILE RSYNC -AZ -E SSH --DELETE ~/ PUBLIC_HTML/ REMOTE .COM:'~/ PUBLIC_HTML' RSYNC -AUZ -E SSH REMOTE:/ DIR/ . && RSYNC -AUZ -E SSH . REMOTE:/ DIR/ SSH (SECURE SHELL) SSH $USER@$HOST COMMAND

LOCALLY COPY WITH RATE LIMIT . IT'S LIKE NICE FOR I/O MIRROR WEB SITE (USING COMPRESSION AND ENCRYPTION ) SYNCHRONIZE CURRENT DIRECTORY WITH REMOTE ONE

RUN COMMAND ON $HOST AS $USER (DEFAULT COMMAND =SHELL ) RUN GUI COMMAND ON $HOSTNAME AS $USER COPY WITH PERMISSIONS TO $USER' S HOME DIRECTORY ON $HOST USE FASTER CRYPTO FOR LOCAL LAN. THIS MIGHT SATURATE GIGE FORWARD CONNECTIONS TO $HOSTNAME:8080 OUT TO $HOST:80 FORWARD CONNECTIONS FROM $HOST:1434 IN TO IMAP:143 INSTALL PUBLIC KEY FOR $USER@$HOST FOR PASSWORD -LESS LOG IN STORE LOCAL BROWSABLE VERSION OF A PAGE TO THE
CURRENT DIR

SSH -F -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME XEYES

SCP -P -R $USER@$HOST: FILE DIR/ SCP -C ARCFOUR $USER@$LANHOST: BIGFILE SSH -G -L 8080: LOCALHOST :80 ROOT @$HOST SSH -R 1434: IMAP:143 ROOT @$HOST SSH-COPY -ID $USER@$HOST WGET (MULTI PURPOSE DOWNLOAD TOOL)

(CD DIR/ && WGET -ND -PHEKK HTTP:// WWW.PIXELBEAT .ORG/CMDLINE .HTML )
WGET -C HTTP:// WWW.EXAMPLE .COM/ LARGE .FILE WGET -R -ND -NP -L1 -A '*.JPG' HTTP:// WWW.EXAMPLE .COM/ DIR/

CONTINUE DOWNLOADING A PARTIALLY DOWNLOADED

FILE

DOWNLOAD A SET OF FILES TO THE CURRENT DIRECTORY

62

NRI-IT
WGET FTP:// REMOTE / FILE [1-9].ISO /

UNIX/LINUX

MCA FTP SUPPORTS GLOBBING DIRECTLY PROCESS OUTPUT DIRECTLY DOWNLOAD URL AT 1AM TO CURRENT DIR DO A LOW PRIORITY DOWNLOAD (LIMIT TO 20KB/ S IN THIS CASE ) CHECK LINKS IN A FILE EFFICIENTLY UPDATE A LOCAL COPY OF A SITE (HANDY FROM CRON ) SHOW STATUS OF ETHERNET INTERFACE ETH 0

WGET -Q -O- HTTP:// WWW.PIXELBEAT .ORG/ TIMELINE .HTML | GREP ' A HREF' | HEAD ECHO ' WGET URL ' | AT 01:00 WGET --LIMIT -RATE =20K URL WGET -NV --SPIDER --FORCE -HTML -I BOOKMARKS .HTML WGET --MIRROR HTTP:// WWW.EXAMPLE .COM/

NETWORKING (NOTE IFCONFIG , ROUTE , MII-TOOL , NSLOOKUP COMMANDS ARE OBSOLETE ) ETHTOOL ETH 0 ETHTOOL --CHANGE ETH 0 AUTONEG OFF SPEED IWCONFIG ETH 1 IWCONFIG ETH 1 RATE

100 DUPLEX FULL

MANUALLY SET ETHERNET INTERFACE SPEED SHOW STATUS OF WIRELESS INTERFACE ETH 1 MANUALLY SET WIRELESS INTERFACE SPEED LIST WIRELESS NETWORKS IN RANGE LIST NETWORK INTERFACES RENAME INTERFACE ETH 0 TO WAN BRING INTERFACE ETH 0 UP (OR DOWN) LIST ADDRESSES FOR INTERFACES ADD (OR DEL) IP AND MASK (255.255.255.0) LIST ROUTING TABLE SET DEFAULT GATEWAY TO 1.2.3.254 LOOKUP DNS IP ADDRESS FOR NAME OR VICE VERSA LOOKUP LOCAL IP ADDRESS (EQUIVALENT TO HOST `HOSTNAME `) LOOKUP WHOIS INFO FOR HOSTNAME OR IP ADDRESS LIST INTERNET SERVICES ON A SYSTEM LIST ACTIVE CONNECTIONS TO/FROM SYSTEM FIND WINDOWS MACHINES . SEE ALSO FINDSMB FIND THE WINDOWS (NETBIOS) NAME ASSOCIATED
WITH IP ADDRESS

1MB/S FIXED

IWLIST SCAN IP LINK SHOW

IP LINK SET DEV ETH 0 NAME WAN IP LINK SET DEV ETH 0 UP

IP ADDR SHOW
IP ADDR ADD

1.2.3.4/24 BRD + DEV ETH0

IP ROUTE SHOW
IP ROUTE ADD DEFAULT VIA 1.2.3.254

HOST PIXELBEAT .ORG HOSTNAME -I WHOIS PIXELBEAT .ORG NETSTAT -TUPL NETSTAT -TUP SMBTREE
NMBLOOKUP -A 1.2.3.4 SMBCLIENT

WINDOWS NETWORKING (NOTE SAMBA IS THE PACKAGE THAT PROVIDES ALL THIS WINDOWS SPECIFIC NETWORKING SUPPORT )

-L WINDOWS_BOX

LIST SHARES ON WINDOWS MACHINE OR SAMBA SERVER MOUNT A WINDOWS SHARE SEND POPUP TO WINDOWS MACHINE (OFF BY DEFAULT IN XP SP2) REPLACE STRING1 WITH STRING2 63

MOUNT -T SMBFS -O FMASK =666, GUEST // WINDOWS _BOX/ SHARE /MNT/SHARE ECHO 'MESSAGE ' | SMBCLIENT -M WINDOWS _BOX TEXT MANIPULATION

(NOTE SED USES STDIN AND STDOUT . NEWER VERSIONS SUPPORT INPLACE EDITING WITH THE -I OPTION)

SED ' S/STRING1/ STRING2/ G'

NRI-IT
SED ' S/\(.*\)1/\12/ G' SED '/ *#/D; /^ *$/D' SED ':A; /\\$/N; S/\\\ N//; TA' SED ' S/[ \T ]*$//' SED ' S/\([`"$\]\)/\\\1/ G'

UNIX/LINUX

MCA MODIFY ANYSTRING 1 TO ANYSTRING2 REMOVE COMMENTS AND BLANK LINES CONCATENATE LINES WITH TRAILING \ REMOVE TRAILING SPACES FROM LINES ESCAPE SHELL METACHARACTERS ACTIVE WITHIN
DOUBLE QUOTES

SEQ 10 | SED "S/^/

SED -N '1000{ P; Q}' SED -N '10,20P;20Q'

/; S/ *\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/"

RIGHT ALIGN NUMBERS PRINT 1000TH LINE PRINT LINES 10 TO 20 EXTRACT TITLE FROM HTML WEB PAGE DELETE A PARTICULAR LINE SORT IPV4 IP ADDRESSES CASE CONVERSION FILTER NON PRINTABLE CHARACTERS
CUT FIELDS SEPARATED BY BLANKS

SED -N ' S/.*<TITLE >\(.*\)<\/TITLE >.*/\1/ IP;T; Q' SED -I 42D ~/.SSH/ KNOWN_HOSTS SORT -T . -K 1,1N -K 2,2N -K 3,3N -K 4,4N

ECHO 'TEST' | TR '[: LOWER:]' '[: UPPER:]' TR -DC '[: PRINT:]' < /DEV/URANDOM TR -S '[: BLANK :]' '\T' </PROC/DISKSTATS | CUT -F4 HISTORY | WC -L
SET OPERATIONS SORT FILE 1 FILE 2 | UNIQ SORT FILE 1 FILE 2 | UNIQ -D SORT FILE 1 FILE 1 FILE 2 | UNIQ -U SORT FILE 1 FILE 2 | UNIQ -U JOIN -T '\0' -A1 -A2 FILE 1 FILE 2 JOIN -T '\0' FILE 1 FILE 2 JOIN -T '\0' -V2 FILE 1 FILE 2 JOIN -T '\0' -V1 -V2 FILE 1 FILE 2 MATH

COUNT LINES UNION OF UNSORTED FILES INTERSECTION OF UNSORTED FILES DIFFERENCE OF UNSORTED FILES SYMMETRIC DIFFERENCE OF UNSORTED FILES UNION OF SORTED FILES INTERSECTION OF SORTED FILES DIFFERENCE OF SORTED FILES SYMMETRIC DIFFERENCE OF SORTED FILES Q UICK MATH (CALCULATE ). SEE ALSO BC CALCULATE THE UNIX WAY MORE COMPLEX (INT ) E .G. THIS SHOWS MAX FASTE
PACKET RATE

(NOTE YOU CAN EXPORT LANG=C FOR SPEED. ALSO THESE ASSUME NO DUPLICATE LINES WITHIN A FILE)

ECHO '(1 + SQRT(5))/2' | BC -L SEQ -F '4/% G' 1 2 99999 | PASTE -SD-+ | BC -L ECHO 'PAD=20; MIN=64; (100*10^6)/((PAD+MIN)*8)' | BC ECHO 'PAD=20; MIN=64; PRINT (100E6)/((PAD+MIN)*8)' | PYTHON
ECHO ' PAD=20; PLOT [64:1518] GNUPLOT -PERSIST

PYTHON HANDLES SCIENTIFIC NOTATION PLOT FASTE PACKET RATE VS PACKET SIZE BASE CONVERSION (DECIMAL TO HEXADECIMAL) BASE CONVERSION (HEX TO DEC) ((SHELL ARITHMETIC EXPANSION )) UNIT CONVERSION (METRIC TO IMPERIAL ) UNIT CONVERSION (SI TO IEC PREFIXES)

(100*10**6)/((PAD+X)*8)' |

ECHO 'OBASE =16; IBASE =10; 64206' | BC ECHO $((0X2DEC)) UNITS -T '100M/9.58S' 'MILES/HOUR' UNITS -T '500GB' 'GIB' 64

NRI-IT UNITS -T '1 GOOGOL' SEQ 100 | (TR '\N' +; ECHO 0) | BC

CALENDAR

UNIX/LINUX DEFINITION LOOKUP

MCA ADD A COLUMN OF NUMBERS. SEE ALSO ADD AND

FUNCPY

CAL -3 CAL 9 1752 DATE -D FRI [ $(DATE -D '12:00 +1 DAY' +% D) = '01' ] || EXIT DATE --DATE ='25 DEC' +%A DATE --DATE ='@2147483647' TZ='AMERICA/LOS_ANGELES' DATE DATE --DATE ='TZ="AMERICA/LOS_ANGELES" 09:00 NEXT FRI'
LOCALES

DISPLAY A CALENDAR DISPLAY A CALENDAR FOR A PARTICULAR MONTH YEAR W HAT DATE IS IT THIS FRIDAY . SEE ALSO DAY
EXIT A SCRIPT UNLESS IT' S THE LAST DAY OF THE MONTH

W HAT DAY DOES XMAS FALL ON, THIS YEAR CONVERT SECONDS SINCE THE EPOCH (1970-01-01 UTC) TO DATE W HAT TIME IS IT ON WEST COAST OF US (USE TZSELECT TO FIND TZ) W HAT'S THE LOCAL TIME FOR 9AM NEXT FRIDAY ON WEST COAST US PRINT NUMBER WITH THOUSANDS GROUPING
APPROPRIATE TO LOCALE

PRINTF "%'D\N" 1234 BLOCK_SIZE=\'1 LS -L ECHO "I LIVE IN `LOCALE TERRITORY `" LANG=EN_IE.UTF8 LOCALE INT _PREFIX LOCALE -KC $(LOCALE | SED -N 'S/\(LC_.\{4,\}\)=.*/\1/P') | LESS
RECODE (OBSOLETES ICONV, DOS 2UNIX , UNIX 2DOS)

USE LOCALE THOUSANDS GROUPING IN LS . SEE ALSO L EXTRACT INFO FROM LOCALE DATABASE LOOKUP LOCALE INFO FOR SPECIFIC COUNTRY . SEE ALSO
CCODES

LIST FIELDS AVAILABLE IN LOCALE DATABASE SHOW AVAILABLE CONVERSIONS (ALIASES ON EACH LINE ) W INDOWS "ANSI" TO LOCAL CHARSET (AUTO DOES CRLF CONVERSION) W INDOWS UTF8 TO LOCAL CHARSET LATIN9 (WESTERN EUROPE ) TO UTF8 BASE 64 ENCODE Q UOTED PRINTABLE DECODE TEXT TO HTML LOOKUP TABLE OF CHARACTERS SHOW WHAT A CODE REPRESENTS IN LATIN -9 CHARMAP SHOW LATIN-9 ENCODING SHOW UTF-8 ENCODING SAVE COPY OF DATA CDROM

RECODE -L | LESS
RECODE WINDOWS -1252.. FILE _TO_CHANGE .TXT RECODE UTF-8/CRLF.. FILE _ TO _CHANGE .TXT RECODE ISO -8859-15..UTF8 FILE _TO _CHANGE .TXT RECODE ../ B64 < FILE .TXT > FILE .B64 RECODE / QP.. < FILE .QP > FILE .TXT RECODE ..HTML < FILE .TXT > FILE .HTML

RECODE -LF WINDOWS -1252 | GREP EURO ECHO -N 0X80 | RECODE LATIN-9/X1..DUMP ECHO -N 0X20AC | RECODE UCS-2/X2..LATIN-9/X ECHO -N 0X20AC | RECODE UCS-2/X2..UTF-8/X CDS
GZIP < /DEV/CDROM > CDROM.ISO .GZ

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MOUNT -O LOOP CDROM .ISO / MNT/ DIR CDRECORD -V DEV=/ DEV/ CDROM BLANK =FAST

UNIX/LINUX

MCA CREATE CDROM IMAGE FROM CONTENTS OF DIR MOUNT THE CDROM IMAGE AT /MNT/DIR (READ ONLY ) CLEAR A CDRW BURN CDROM IMAGE (USE DEV=ATAPI -SCANBUS TO CONFIRM DEV) RIP AUDIO TRACKS FROM CD TO WAV FILES IN CURRENT
DIR

MKISOFS -V LABEL -R DIR | GZIP > CDROM.ISO .GZ

GZIP -DC CDROM.ISO .GZ | CDRECORD -V DEV=/ DEV/ CDROM CDPARANOIA -B CDRECORD -V DEV=/ DEV/ CDROM -AUDIO -PAD *.WAV OGGENC --TRACKNUM='TRACK ' TRACK .CDDA .WAV -O ' TRACK .OGG' DISK SPACE

MAKE AUDIO CD FROM ALL WAVS IN CURRENT DIR (SEE ALSO CDRDAO ) MAKE OGG FILE FROM WAV FILE SHOW FILES BY SIZE , BIGGEST LAST SHOW TOP DISK USERS IN CURRENT DIR. SEE ALSO
DUTOP

(SEE ALSO FSLINT)

LS -LSR DU -S * | SORT -K1,1RN | HEAD DU -HS /HOME/* | SORT -K1,1H DF -H DF -I FDISK -L RPM -Q -A --QF '%10{SIZE}\T%{NAME}\N' | SORT -K1,1N

SORT PATHS BY EASY TO INTERPRET DISK USAGE SHOW FREE SPACE ON MOUNTED FILESYSTEMS SHOW FREE INODES ON MOUNTED FILESYSTEMS SHOW DISKS PARTITIONS SIZES AND TYPES (RUN AS ROOT ) LIST ALL PACKAGES BY INSTALLED SIZE (BYTES) ON RPM
DISTROS

DPKG-QUERY -W -F='${INSTALLED-S IZE ;10}\ T ${PACKAGE }\ N' | SORT - LIST ALL PACKAGES BY INSTALLED SIZE K 1,1N DISTROS ALSO TRUNCATE

(KBYTES) ON DEB

DD BS=1 SEEK =2TB IF=/DEV/NULL OF=EXT3.TEST > FILE

MONITORING /DEBUGGING

CREATE A LARGE TEST FILE (TAKING NO SPACE ). SEE

TRUNCATE DATA OF FILE OR CREATE AN EMPTY FILE

TAIL -F /VAR/LOG/MESSAGES STRACE -C LS >/DEV/NULL STRACE -F -E OPEN LS >/DEV/NULL STRACE -F -E TRACE=WRITE -E WRITE =1,2 LS >/DEV/NULL LTRACE -F -E GETENV LS >/DEV/NULL LSOF -P $$ LSOF ~ TCPDUMP NOT PORT 22 PS -E -O PID,ARGS --FOREST
PS -E -O PCPU,CPU ,NICE ,STATE,CPUTIME ,ARGS --SORT PCPU | SED '/^ 0.0 /D'

MONITOR MESSAGES IN A LOG FILE SUMMARISE /PROFILE SYSTEM CALLS MADE BY

COMMAND

LIST SYSTEM CALLS MADE BY COMMAND MONITOR WHAT 'S WRITTEN TO STDOUT AND STDERR LIST LIBRARY CALLS MADE BY COMMAND LIST PATHS THAT PROCESS ID HAS OPEN LIST PROCESSES THAT HAVE SPECIFIED PATH OPEN SHOW NETWORK TRAFFIC EXCEPT SSH . SEE ALSO TCPDUMP_NOT _ME LIST PROCESSES IN A HIERARCHY LIST PROCESSES BY % CPU USAGE

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UNIX/LINUX

PS -E -ORSS=,ARGS= | SORT -B -K1,1N | PR -TW$COLUMNS PS -C FIREFOX -BIN -L -O PID,TID,PCPU,STATE PS -P 1,$$ -O ETIME = LAST REBOOT FREE -M WATCH -N.1 'CAT /PROC/INTERRUPTS' UDEVADM MONITOR UNAME -A HEAD -N1 /ETC/ISSUE CAT /PROC/PARTITIONS GREP MEMTOTAL /PROC/MEMINFO GREP "MODEL NAME " /PROC/CPUINFO LSPCI -TV LSUSB -TV MOUNT | COLUMN -T GREP -F CAPACITY : /PROC/ACPI/BATTERY/BAT0/ INFO # DMIDECODE -Q | LESS # SMARTCTL -A /DEV/SDA | GREP POWER_ON_HOURS # HDPARM -I /DEV/SDA # HDPARM -TT /DEV/SDA # BADBLOCKS -S /DEV/SDA
INTERACTIVE (SEE ALSO LINUX KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS)

MCA LIST PROCESSES BY MEM (KB) USAGE . SEE ALSO PS_MEM.PY LIST ALL THREADS FOR A PARTICULAR PROCESS LIST ELAPSED WALL TIME FOR PARTICULAR PROCESS IDS SHOW SYSTEM REBOOT HISTORY SHOW AMOUNT OF (REMAINING) RAM (-M DISPLAYS IN MB) W ATCH CHANGEABLE DATA CONTINUOUSLY MONITOR UDEV EVENTS TO HELP CONFIGURE RULES SHOW KERNEL VERSION AND SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE SHOW NAME AND VERSION OF DISTRIBUTION SHOW ALL PARTITIONS REGISTERED ON THE SYSTEM SHOW RAM TOTAL SEEN BY THE SYSTEM SHOW CPU(S) INFO SHOW PCI INFO SHOW USB INFO LIST MOUNTED FILESYSTEMS ON THE SYSTEM (AND ALIGN OUTPUT ) SHOW STATE OF CELLS IN LAPTOP BATTERY DISPLAY SMBIOS/DMI INFORMATION HOW LONG HAS THIS DISK (SYSTEM) BEEN POWERED ON
IN TOTAL

SYSTEM INFORMATION (SEE ALSO SYSINFO ) ('#' MEANS ROOT ACCESS IS REQUIRED )

SHOW INFO ABOUT DISK SDA DO A READ SPEED TEST ON DISK SDA TEST FOR UNREADABLE BLOCKS ON DISK SDA LINE EDITOR USED BY BASH, PYTHON, BC, GNUPLOT , ... VIRTUAL TERMINALS WITH DETACH CAPABILITY , ... POWERFUL FILE MANAGER THAT CAN BROWSE RPM , TAR, FTP, SSH, ... INTERACTIVE /SCRIPTABLE GRAPHING W EB BROWSER
OPEN A FILE OR URL WITH THE REGISTERED DESKTOP APPLICATION

READLINE SCREEN MC GNUPLOT LINKS XDG-OPEN .

67