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Contents
Contents
A Guide for Linux and the Department Computing Facilities
1
Amit Jain and John Rickerd
Last Revised: April 22, 2013
©
Amit Jain and John Rickerd
Contents
Departmental Computing Facilities
Real Basics
Who to ask for help?
Beginner's Guide
Getting started
Logging in
Changing your password
Logging out of the system
Some basics
Correcting your typing
Special keys
Case sensitivity
On-line help
Files and directories
File names
Creating files and directories
Your current directory
Your home directory
Changing directories
Special directories
Special files
Other interesting directories
Viewing the contents of a text file
Listing files and directories
Wild-cards and file name completion
File protection
Copying files or directories
Renaming a file or directory:
Removing(Deleting) files or directories
Symbolic links and hard links
Editing files
The
Vim
file editor
The GNU
emacs
file editor
Printing files
Electronic mail
Forwarding email
Text-based mail clients
Graphical mail clients
Working on the Internet
Host-names and Internet addresses
Surfing the Internet
File transfer
Remote access
ssh
telnet
Linux graphical user interfaces
Cut and paste using a mouse
Working with the KDE desktop
Creating directories in the KDE file browser
Creating shortcuts on the KDE desktop
Using CDs and DVDs
Copying a directory to a CD or DVD
Burning CDs or DVDs
Playing a movie
Viewing a collection of photos
Editing photos
Rotating a photo
Changing brightness of a photo
Cropping a photo
Screenshot
Running remote graphical programs
Other useful GUI programs
Viewing postscript and PDF files
Advanced User's Guide
Customizing your shell and improving productivity
Startup or run control files
Changing your shell prompt
Setting the path: how the shell finds programs
Aliases
Customizing ls
Enhancing cd using a stack
Repeating and editing previous commands
Packing up and backing up your files
Archiving files with
tar
Compressing files with
gzip
Compressing files with
bzip2
Backing up your files
Recovering lost files
Other useful commands
Finding the date and the time
Recording a terminal session
Obtaining information about other users
Changing your personal information
Changing your login shell
Disk quota
Checking disk usage
Counting the number of characters, words and lines
Finding patterns in files using your buddy
grep
Locating files in the system
Finding files in your home directory
Using
find
for useful tasks
Sorting files
Displaying the last few lines in a file
Finding the differences between two text files
Finding the differences between two binary files
Time a command or a program
Spell checking
Watching a command
Filters: cool objects
Character transliteration with
tr
Comparing sorted file with
comm
Stream editing with
sed
String processing with
awk
Processes and Pipes
Input-Output redirection
Processes
Creating and managing processes
Killing processes
Playing Lego in Linux
Running commands in series
Combining commands using pipes
Shell programming
Creating new commands
Command arguments and parameters
Program output as an argument
Shell metacharacters
Shell variables
Loops and conditional statements in shell programs
Arithmetic in shell scripts
Interactive programs in shell scripts
Useful commands for shell scripts
The
basename
command
The
test
command
Functions
More shell script examples
Printing with proper tab spaces
Simple test script
Changing file extensions in one fell swoop
Replacing a word in all files in a directory
Counting files greater than a certain size
Counting number of lines of code recursively
Backing up your files periodically
Backing up your files with minimal disk space
Watching if a user logs in or logs out
Further Exploration
Bibliography
About this document ...
Amit Jain 2013-04-22
