Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities
Download 66.03 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Optional Reading
- The history Command
- Directory and File Commands
- Root Directory and its Subdirectories
- File Utilities
- Displaying Text Files
- The Manual
- Directory and File Permissions
- Setting Permissions
- Reference
Basic Linux Commands and CapabilitiesIntroductionThe original Unix operating system and its successor Linux were designed to support the common tasks and needs of software developers and computer users. This laboratory exercise reviews some basic commands and capabilities that match likely needs of IT 325 students. Optional ReadingGraham Glass and King Ables, Linux for Programmers and Users, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006, chapter 4. Some UtilitiesThe Arrow KeysSuppose you want to run a command that you ran a short while ago? If the command is complicated, it would be nice not to have to re-type it, and you don't have to! 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. The history CommandBut what if the command you want was several commands ago, say 10? Who wants to type that many arrows? To see another option, first type the following to get a list of the commands you have used most recently. history Typically, a terminal window remembers the last 50 commands (although a user can change this number). At the start, the history list might look something like this. 505 sleep 10 506 history In this listing, each command is numbered for future reference. For example, with this listing, if you want to re-issue the sleep command, you could do so by typing"!505" to repeat command number 505. Better yet (since you don't need to know the command number), you can repeat the command with "!s". This will re-issue the most recent command that begins with the prefix "s". Note that the prefix can be of any length; it is not limited to one character. catIt 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, 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. As an aside, note that the command name cat stands for "concatenate" for reasons we will explore later. Directory and File CommandsThe Linux Directory/File HierarchyLinux maintains directories and files in a hierarchical structure, called a tree structure. This section explores this organization. PathnamesWhen 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 csc153, thenscheme/hw2.s could be a relative pathname for a file named hw2.s located in a directory named scheme that was itself inside csc153. An absolute pathname, such as /home/username/csc153/scheme/hw2.s, includes the file's complete path starting with the system's "root" directory, which is always named "/" on a Linux system. Just like it sounds, the root directory is the topmost directory in the file system tree. Each directory in a Linux system contains two special files "." and ".." that can be useful when constructing relative pathnames. The file named "." means "the current directory," and the file named ".." means "the parent directory". For example, ../c could be a directory that is a sibling of your current working directory (i.e., c could be a directory that has the same parent directory your current working directory does). Then ../c/labs/hw2.c could refer to a file farther down that branch of the tree. Similarly, ../../pix/grinnell could be a directory that is a cousin of your current directory in the file system tree. To get any file pathname by specifying the file name, simply do that by using find / -name Filename. The tilde character is also useful for specifying pathnames, but it works a little differently. Used alone, it specifies your home directory, so ~/csc153/hw is a short name for /home/username/csc153/hw. 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 ls -l ~walker/public_html Root Directory and its SubdirectoriesWhile 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.
Sometimes locating a program can be something of a challenge, but the commands which and whereis can help you solve this problem. For example, both whereisacroread and whichacroread will give you the absolute path name of the acroread program. File UtilitiesSome common file management commands are listed in the table below. You should try each of these to determine just how they work.
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 -p ls -l mkdir -p pushd and popdTwo 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 courses/csc201/hw/ and you want to jump to a directory in another branch of your file system tree, say public_html/courses, 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: pushdpublic_html/courses 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. Go ahead and give these commands a try. Of course, 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 FilesIt 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.
The ManualLinux includes an on-line help system, called the manual. There is a "man page" describing each Linux command and each C library function. Don't worry if you don't understand everything you see in a man page. They are often long and cryptic, but you can learn a lot without having to understand everything. For example, try typing "man cat" to read about cat. 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 or C functions 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". Of course, keyword searches are more useful for some commands than others: "man -k print" may reap you more results than you want to deal with! Directory and File PermissionsFrom a user's perspective within Unix or Linux, the world of files and directories is divided into three categories:
For each of these categories, users in these categories can have three types of capabilities:
To clarify how these permissions work, we consider a long listing of files in a subdirectory for Marge Coahran: ls -l ~coahranm/public_html total 40 drwxr-xr-x 4 coahranmmathfac 4096 2007-04-25 16:32 csc105 drwxr-xr-x 6 coahranmmathfac 4096 2007-01-19 16:04 csc152 drwxr-xr-x 4 coahranmmathfac 4096 2007-01-19 19:10 csc201 drwxr-xr-x 4 coahranmmathfac 4096 2007-09-01 15:43 csc211 drwxr-xr-x 4 coahranmmathfac 4096 2007-08-31 17:56 csc301 -rw-r--r-- 1 coahranmmathfac 5808 2007-09-01 20:38 index.html -rw-r--r-- 1 coahranmmathfac 5808 2007-08-31 19:02 index.html~ drwxr-xr-x 2 coahranmmathfac 4096 2008-01-02 15:55 mmc_files getfacl Filename, allows you to get the permission specified without accessing the whole file in a subdirectory. In the listing, the first character indicates whether the item is a directory (d) or a regular file (-). Thus, in this directory, csc211 is a directory (line starts with d), and index.html is a regular file. The next characters list specific file permissions (r=read, w=write, x=execute) for the user, group, and world, in that order. Thus, immediately after the "d" character for the csc105 directory, the sequence "rwx" indicates that user coahranm has all three permissions for these capabilities. However, both the group and the world have permissions "r-x", indicates that others can read and execute the directory, but others cannot modify (write) the directory. Following this permission information, a number appears for the "number of links" involved with the file. You’ll find out what this means later in this course! The rest of the line gives the username and groupname of the file's owner (coahranm and mathfac), the file's size, the date and time the file was last modified and the file name. You may belong to more than one group on the MathLAN. To see a list of all of your groups, use the command groups. If you get really confused, you can ask for your own username with the command whoami. Setting PermissionsYou 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 CSC 105 above, Ms. Coahran might have issued the command chmod 755 csc105 Here, the user (Ms. Coahran) has full permissions (7=read+write+execute); while the others can read and execute, but not write (5). ReferenceExtracted from “Basic Linux Commands and Capabilities”. Online: “http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/courses/161.sp09/readings/reading-linux-basics.shtml”.Directory: 2012 2012 -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? 2012 -> Annual InStructional unit plan 2012 -> University of Hawai‘i Maui College dental assisting program review october 21, 2013 2012 -> Committee on the rights of the child the rights of all children in the context of international migration 2012 -> Background on the Haitian Earthquake 2012 -> The Collected Wisdom of Science Olympiad Coaches 2012 -> Federal Communications Commission fcc 12-81 Before the Federal Communications Commission 2012 -> Aa and na members Dying from Tobacco 2012 -> [Baby Crying] 01: 04 [Ching Download 66.03 Kb. Share with your friends:
|