#Command line lesson 01

Source files in order to conduct an introduction to the command line workshop

Source Material for Mentorship Programme.

A Brief History of the Unix Command line

The unix operating system was invented over 40 years ago for scientific and professional users who wanted a very powerful and flexible Operating system.

It has evolved since then through a remarkably circuitous path through many major software companies and universities.

Because unix was designed for experts by experts it comes with a wide range of built in tools and commands, and today it still remains one of the preferred Operating systems among developers.

Unix is pretty much the same, regardless of whether you're using it on Mac OSX, FreeBSD, or Linux, or even on tiny embedded systems or on a giant super computer.

Further reading

http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html

Why use the command line

Why would a person want to type in a bunch of unix commands when you can just use the mouse? After all, OSX has one of the best user interfaces out there, so what would compel you as a Mac user to use the unix command line for your development work. That my friends, is a very hard sell but you can boil it down to speed, efficiency and power.

Lying underneath the mac OSX interface is a powerful Unix system, ready to leap into action at a moment's notice, all you have to do is ask, and one of the best ways to ask is via command line instructions.

Some of the most common commands you will use are listed below

File system navigation

ls -- List directory contents

cd -- Change the current directory to DIR

pwd -- return working directory name

File and directory creation

touch -- change file access and modification times

mkdir -- make directories

File and directory relocation

cp -- copy files or directories

mv -- move files or directories

rm -- remove files or directories

View and edit files

more -- reads and print files

less -- reads and print files

cat -- concatenate and print file

vim -- Vi Improved, a programmers' text editor

emacs -- Emacs is the extensible, customizable, editor

nano -- Nano a small and friendly text editor

What is a shell

In computing, a shell is a user interface the provides access to an operating system's services. In general, operating system shells use either a command-line interface (CLI) or graphical user interface (GUI), depending on a computer's role and particular operation. It's named a shell because it is a layer around the operating system kernel.

Shell script

 #!/bin/bash

 for i in `seq 1 10`;
 do
  echo $i
 done

Fun in the terminal

• say
• date
• cal
• emacs -nw --eval="(tetris)"
• telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Where to get help

• man -- manual page for most standard command line tools
• help -- help for native shell commands
• info -- information for some command line tools

Futures

• git -- A distributed version control system
• grep, egrep, fgrep, zgrep, zegrep, zfgrep -- file pattern searcher
• pipe ( |, >, <) -- pipe is not a stand alone command its more of an operator
• history
• ps
• top
• chown
• chmod
• awk
• sed
• mc
• python
• node

install dot-files

git clone [email protected]:aaron-goshine/commandline-lesson-01.git &&
cd commandline-lesson-01/package-dofiles/ &&
cp -rf ./ ~/ &&
cd ../../ &&
rm -rf commandline-lesson-01