UNIX is Your Friend

For anyone needing a push to get comfortable on Athena or looking to expand one's UNIX toolbox. We'll rapid-fire demo and give usecases for as many utilities as we can fit into the hour and send you home with a comprehensive cheat sheet with even more tools to keep you learning.

Topics include:

  • what is taking up all of my CPU cycles? (ps, top, kill)
  • getting files from place to place (tar, gzip, scp, wget)
  • why can't I find anything?? (grep, find, vi/emacs tags)
  • simple but useful shell scripts
  • screen
Bring a laptop.

When and Where: Wed Jan 21, 6:00-7:00pm, 4-237
Prerequisites: None
Contact: Jessica McKellar, Andrew Farrell, sipb-iap-unix@mit.edu


The List (updated continually)
Teach a man to fish...
man

Handling jobs
C-c
C-z
bg
fg
jobs
jobs
kill
killall
pkill
ps
top
Moving yourself and files
(g)zip/(g)unzip
curl
pushd, popd
scp
sftp
ssh
tar cvf
tar xvf(z)
wget

Reading, writing, getting stats on files
cat (> >>)
diff
echo
head
less
more
redirection (< >)
tail
tail -f
touch
wc
Finding things
find
grep
ln -s
ls -al
pgrep
vi/emacs tags
whereis
whichlocker
xargs (ps ax | grep python | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9)

Where are you?
finger (@)
hostname
netcat
ping
uname
w
who
whoami

Customization
.bashrc
.login
aliases
Permissions
chmod
chown
fs la
fs sa
fsr sa
su, sudo

Miscellaneous
clear, C-l
crontab -e
dict
screen
simple but useful shell scripts
sort
strings
version control!
wall
ytalk
zephyr

Resources:
GNU Coreutils Manual - examples for several common text and file manipulation tools


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Take a look at the rest of the SIPB IAP class list