Caroline Cahill Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities

#!/bin/bash
echo "what is your name?"
read name
echo "Hello $name!. Welcome to ICT Skills Scripting Tutorial"

Some Utilities
The Arrow Keys
Suppose you want to run a command that you ran a short while ago? Within the terminal
window, this is accomplished using the up-arrow key to retrieve previous commands.

Once you have viewed some earlier commands, note that thedown-arrow also works,
which can be helpful if you go too far.

Type pwd to see print your current working directory

Type ls –l to get a list of the files here
Type clear

The history Command

But what if the command you want was several commands ago, say 10? Who wants to type that
many arrows?

Type history
In this listing, each command is numbered for future reference.
For example, with this listing, if you want to re-issue a previous pwd command, you
could do so by typing"!20" (or whatever number it is!) to repeat command number 20.
Better yet (since you don't need to know the command number)
Type !p #This will re-issue the most recent command that begins with the prefix "p".
Type !pw Note the prefix can be any length; it is not limited to one character i.e. !pw

cat
It is often convenient to look at the contents of a text file without having to open it in an editor.
The simplest command for this purpose is cat. For example,

Type cat .bashrc

would display the contents of the .bashrc file in your terminal window. Although cat works
well for short files that can be viewed all on one screen, we will see shortly that other commands
may work better for longer files.
.bashrc #runs whenever it is started interactively. rc was inspired by the run com
facility from early Unix releases
cat #stands for "concatenate" (which means "to combine" or "to join
together")

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Type cat #without any command, you’re only moved to the next line, where the
system is waiting for some standard input

<Ctrl> + c is the universal signal for Cancel in Linux.

Wildcards
Wildcards are a set of building blocks that allow you to create a pattern defining a set of files or
directories. As you would remember, whenever we refer to a file or directory on the command
line we are actually referring to a path. Whenever we refer to a path we may also use wildcards
in that path to turn it into a set of files or directories.
Here is the basic set of wildcards:
 * - represents zero or more characters
 ? - represents a single character
 [] - represents a range of characters (these are the square brackets)

Further Reading, Study and Practice on

http://ryanstutorials.net/bash-scripting-tutorial/

E.g. Using wildcards, what command would

1. remove all Java files?

2. remove all java files with three letters?
3. remove all files with three letters,irrespective of their extension, if there is any?
4. remove all files whose second letters is i?
5. list all files beginning with a b?
6. List every file whose name either begins with a c or m?
7. List every file whose name includes a digit?

Directory and File Commands

The Linux Directory/File Hierarchy
Linux maintains directories and files in a hierarchical structure, called a tree structure. This
section explores this organization.

Pathnames
When you first open a terminal window, the shell expects that you are in your home directory. At
the start, this is called your current "working directory" (i.e., your position within the directory
tree).

A relative pathname for a file is a name that is given "relative" to your current working
directory.
For example, if your current working directory is ictSkills, then
scheme/hw2.s could be a relative pathname for a file named hw2.s located in a
directory named scheme that was itself inside ictSkills.

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Caroline Cahill Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities

An absolute pathname, such /

as /home/username/ictSki
lls/scheme/hw2.s, includes
the file's complete path starting caroline
with the system's "root" directory,
which is always named "/" on a ictSkills
Linux system. Just like it sounds,
the root directory is the topmost
directory in the file system tree. scheme

hw2.s

Each directory in a Linux system contains two special files "." and ".." that can be useful
when constructing relative pathnames.

“.” and “..”

The file named "." means "the
current directory," and the file
named ".." means "the parent photos

directory".
Current
ICTSkills caroline
directory in use
../ICTSkills could be a directory
that is a sibling of your current
labs
working directory
(i.e., ICTSkills could be a
directory that has the same parent hw2.c
directory your current working
directory does).
../ ICTSkills /labs/hw2.c could refer to a file “hw2.c” that resides farther down that
branch of the tree.

../../photos/caroline could be a directory that is a cousin of your current directory in

the file system tree.

EXERCISE: Recreate the following structure, using m_________ command to create a directory
and t_______ to create a blank file (without opening it)

mkdir –p semester2/linux/temp/hw2.c semester2/linux/temp/hw3.c

mkdir –pv semester2/assessment/PracticeFiles
What is the –p option for? _____________________________________________
What is the –pv option for? _____________________________________________

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Caroline Cahill Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities

~ character
The tilde character is also useful for specifying pathnames, but it works a little differently.
Used alone, it specifies your home directory, so ~/semester2/linux is a short name
for /home/username/ semester2/linux.
Finally, ~username refers to the home directory belonging to username. Thus, you can print a
listing of the files in my public_html directory with
Go to the temp directory
Type ls #this is the letter “L”
Type ls -l ~username/semester2/assessment #replace username with your own username
Type cd ~
Type pwd

Root Directory and its Subdirectories

While we are poking around the Linux file system, take a look at the files in the root directory /.
You should see directories with names like /bin, /home, /lib, and/usr.

Again, list the files in each of these directories. They contain many, many files, organized as
follows.
 /bin: These are the executable programs that comprise the GNU/Linux utilities. For
example, there is an executable file here named ls that is run when you issue the
command ls.
 /home: You won't be surprised to hear that user accounts are stored in this directory.
 /lib: This directory is the home of many libraries that can be used by programmers. For
example, you should be able to find a file named libc-2.3.6.so here, that contains
the "standard c library functions".
 /usr: Generally contains application programs, libraries, and other files that are not part
of the GNU/Linux system (i.e., optional resources intended for and requested by users).
For example, the acrobat reader is located here under /usr/bin/acroread.

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Caroline Cahill Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities

File Utilities
Some common file management commands are listed in the table below. You should try each of
these to determine just how they work.
Utility Description
ls "list" files and directories
pwd "print working directory"
cd "change (your working) directory"
mkdir "make directory"

rmdir "remove directory"

cp "copy" a file or directory

mv "move" a file or directory (i.e., rename it)
rm "remove" a file (i.e., delete it)
The following variants can be particularly handy. (Although some details may not be obvious
now, we will see shortly how to find out more information about such commands.)
cd .. cp ls –l mkdir –p

EXERCISES:
Copy hw2.c to the same folder to be named hw4.c
Move FinalSubmission into the linux folder
Copy the temp directory and files to a new directory called CA1
In it's default behaviour cp will only copy a file. Using the -r option, which stands for
recursive, we may copy directories.
Delete the temp directory

The Linux command line does not have an undo feature.

Perform destructive actions carefully.
pushd and popd
Two more commands that can be quite useful for moving around the file system
are pushd and popd. They let you jump back and forth between distant directories quickly and
easily. For example, suppose your current working directory
is semester2/assessment/PracticeFiles and you want to jump to a directory in
another branch of your file system tree, say semester2/linux, and afterward you want to
return to your original directory.
The following command will push the name of your current directory onto a stack of directory
names that Linux maintains behind the scenes, and then change your current directory to the one
named in the command:
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Caroline Cahill Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities
pushd ~semester2/linux

When you are ready to return to your previous directory, you simply type popd. This pops the
most recent directory name off the stack and then makes it your current working directory.
If you like, you can use pushd several times in a row (pushing multiple directory names onto
the stack), and then backtrack through the sequence in reverse order.
As one application, you might use pushd and popd when jumping back and forth between labs
or homework assignments.

Displaying Text Files

It is often convenient to look at the contents of a text file without having to open it in an editor.
Previously in this lab, we saw that cat can be used for this purpose, but it is most useful for
short files that can be viewed all on one screen.
GNU/Linux provides several other utilities that are useful for "paging" through text files (i.e., for
viewing files one page at a time). Several of these commands are outlined in the following table.
Command Description

move through a file screen by screen (hit space for the next page, return for one
more
more line)

a new and improved version that allows backward paging as well with the up-
less
arrow, down-arrow, Page Up, and Page Dn.

head show the first few lines of a file

tail show the last few lines of a file

The Manual man pages

Linux includes an on-line help system, called the manual. There is a "man page" describing each
Linux command

Type man cat to read about cat command.

You should see the command name and a quick synopsis of how to use the command.
For example, the synopsis"cat [OPTION] [FILE] ..." tells you
that cat (optionally) takes a file as it's input, and it also can take (optional) options as
parameters. A list of the options follows the synopsis.

Another handy use for the man pages is finding commands when you don't remember, or never
knew, their names.
Suppose you wanted to find a function for computing the square root: you could guess
that such a function might exist, but you might not know its name. To print a list of man
pages that include the word "square" in the name or description fields, you could
use "man -k square".

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Directory and File Permissions

From a user's perspective within Unix or Linux, the world of files and directories is divided into
three categories:
 the user
 the user's group (e.g., ComputerScience faculty or student)
 everyone else
For each of these categories, users in these categories can have three types of capabilities:
 an individual might have permission to read a file
 an individual might have permission to write or modify a file
 an individual might have permission to execute the file (e.g., run a program)
To clarify how these permissions work, we consider a long listing of files in a subdirectory for
Caroline Cahilll:
ls -l ~cahill/public_html
total 40
drwxr-xr-x 4 cahillcmathfac 4096 2017-04-25 16:32 csc105
drwxr-xr-x 6 cahillcmathfac 4096 2017-01-19 16:04 csc152
-rw-r--r-- 1 cahillcmathfac 5808 2017-09-01 20:38 index.html
drwxr-xr-x 2 cahillcmathfac 4096 2017-01-02 15:55 mmc_files

Setting Permissions
You can set the permissions of the files you own using the chmod command. The simplest
approach is to assign numbers to each capability (4 for read, 2 for write, 1 for execute) and then
to use addition when combining numbers. Thus, 6 = 4+2 (read plus write permission), and 7 =
4+2+1 (all three permissions added together).
Within this framework, you set permissions for a file by specifying the desired capabilities for
the user, group, and world (in that order). Thus, when she set up her directory for assessment
above, might have issued the command

chmod 755 assessment

Here, the user (C Cahill) has full permissions (7=read+write+execute); while the others
can read and execute, but not write (5).