UNIX Tutorial for Beginners

Typographical Conventions

Introduction to The UNIX operating system

Tutorial One

• Listing files and directories
• Making Directories
• Changing to a different Directory
• The directories . and ..
• Pathnames
• More about home directories and pathnames

Tutorial Two

• Copying Files
• Moving Files
• Removing Files and directories
• Displaying the contents of a file on the screen
• Searching the contents of a file

Tutorial Three

• Redirection
• Redirecting the Output
• Redirecting the Input
• Pipes

Tutorial Four

• Wildcards
• Filename Conventions
• Getting Help

Tutorial Five

• File system security (access rights)
• Changing access rights
• Processes and Jobs
• Listing suspended and background processes
• Killing a process

Tutorial Six

• Other Useful UNIX commands

Tutorial Seven

• Compiling UNIX software packages
• Download source code
• Extracting source code
• Configuring and creating the Makefile
• Building the package
• Running the software
• Stripping unnecessary code

Tutorial Eight

• UNIX variables
• Environment variables
• Shell variables
• Using and setting variables

Downloads

This tutorial is available for download in the following formats -

• Unix tar.gz file
• Windows zip file

Recommended UNIX and Linux books

• If you wish to continue learning Unix, here is a list of good Unix and Linux books, ranging from beginners to advanced.

UNIX Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• These seven articles contain the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions often seen in comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell.

History of UNIX

• UNIX was originally developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people. Read all about the history of its creation.

M.Stonebank@surrey.ac.uk, 19 October 2001

This tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons License.