University of Alaska Fairbanks
Geophysical Institute

Beyond the Mouse - The geoscientist's computational chest.

6. Unix Tools I

Introduction to the Unix (-like) operating system. This lecture briefly touches the basics of command line magic, Shell scripts, awk, grep and variables.

Lecture

Unix Tools I (pdf)

Examples

Examples are given in the slides. We recommend to play with these and vary them.

Exercises

Also explore the directories in your path, such as /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin etc. Ask the man pages for more info about the tools that live in these directories: man COMMAND, also try to figure out what the program itself will tell you about it's reason for existance (use the -h, --help flags).

Also try playing with redirections and pipes. Vary the examples given in the slides.

You may want to consider to switch completely to a Unix like operating system :).