unix.doc

More Linux Commands

Up to now, most of us have become familiar with Linux Basics. When developing large software systems, the more command of the OS you have, the more productive you can become. The book "Guide to UNIX Using Linux" in the lab has more detail than most of you will want to know. To help get you started on some of the more advanced Linux commands and features, I will outline some that I use.

Be familiar with cat, more, less, head, and tail commands.
Redirecting output from one command to the input of another through a pipe is essential (e.g. ls -al | more).

The .bash_profile file on circe contains ways for you to customize your development environment. The name of this file changes depending on your login shell. A primitive .bash_profile might be the following:


export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin     #search for executables in current directory or bin
set history="25"       #history displays last 25 commands executed
alias l='ls -al'       #the key l gives detailed listing
alias rm='rm -i'       #prompt user before removing files
alias p='lpr -P venus' #the key p prints to venus

You get the idea.

man - gives you the manual pages for a specific command. (e.g. man cat)
ps - lists your running process id #'s and associated commands
kill -9 PID - kills the running process and all child processes (PID must be a process #)
df - displays amount of free space on the partitions
du - displays file space usage

Appendix B of Guide to Unix using Linux contains most of the commands you should be familiar with. Don't just start playing randomly with these commands. If you have questions, that is what the message board is for!!!