Unix for beginners

Unix

Unix is an operating system similar to DOS and Windows supporting multiple users. It was designed at Bell labs in the 1970s. Many other operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X are based on Unix operating system or behave like Unix systems.

Why should you learn Unix?

Apart from being the base of many operating systems, a multitude of scientific software currently runs only on Unix-based operating systems. Having Unix skills is a desirable attribute for people who are analyzing data and working in a scientific environment. In addition, Unix skills are necessary to understand the Grid Engine environment and run jobs in Grid Engine clusters.

What will you learn?

In this section, you will be learning:

• File management and directories (commands: ls, cd, cp, mv, rm)
• Editing, viewing and concatenating text files (commands: more, less, head, tail, cat, cut etc.)
• Compressing and decompressing files (commands: gzip and zcat)
• Connecting to a remote server with ssh
• Downloading files with wget, curl and ftp
• Simple shell scripts with bash