Introduction to Unix:

Fundamental Commands

Ricky Patterson – UVA Library

Based on slides from Turgut Yilmaz – Istanbul Teknik University

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• What We Will Learn

• The fundamental commands of the

Unix operating system.

• Everything here is also applicable to

the Linux operating system.

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• What Is UNIX?

• UNIX is a computer operating system, a control

program that works with users to
– run programs,
– manage resources, and
– communicate with other computer systems.
• Several people can use a UNIX computer at the
same time; hence UNIX is called a multiuser
system. Any of these users can also run multiple
programs at the same time; hence UNIX is called
multitasking.

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• Shell Commands of UNIX
• Unix Commands
•When you first log into a unix system, you are presented
with something that looks like the following:

/home/ricky# meander:>
•That “something” is called a prompt. As its name would
suggest, it is prompting you to enter a command.
•Every unix command is a sequence of letters, numbers
and characters. But there are no spaces.

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• Unix is also case-sensitive. This means that cat and
Cat are different commands.

• The prompt is displayed by a special program called

the shell.

• Shells accept commands, and run those commands.

• They can also be programmed in their own

language. These programs are called “shell scripts”.
Shell scripts are extremely powerful, but beyond the
scope of this introduction.
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• When you first login, the prompt is displayed
by bash, and you are running your first unix
program, the bash shell.

• As long as you are logged in, the bash shell

will constantly be running.

• Other shells are available, including csh, tcsh,

and ksh.

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• Unix Commands

• obtaining help

• The man command displays reference pages for

the command you specify.
• The UNIX man pages (man is short for manual )
cover every command available.
• To search for a man page, enter man followed by
the name of the command to find .
• For example:
ricky@meander:~>man ls

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 To exit
Press “q”
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 • man (obtaining help)
• There is also a keyword function in man.

• For example;
– If you are interested in any commands that deal with
Postscript, the printer control language for Adobe
– Type man -k ps or man -k Postscript,
you’ll get a listing of all commands, system calls, and
other documented parts of unix that have the word “ps”
(or “Postscript”) in their name or short description.
• This can be very useful when you’re looking for a tool to do
something, but you don’t know it’s name-or if it even exists!

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• cat
• cat command is used to concatenate or displays the contents
of a file.
• To use it, type cat, and then press enter key:
/home/larry# cat
• This produces the correct result and runs the cat program.
Prompt Command

İf you type this row

and then press
enter
The text indicates what we
typed to cat
• To end many unix command, type end-of-file command (EOF)
[hold down the key labeled “Ctrl” and press “d” (Ctrl+d) ]
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• To display the contents of a file, type
cat filename

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• To see linux commands press Tab key,
• If you want to learn commands beginning with c
you can write c then press Tab key
/home/larry# c

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• Storing information

• Unix provides files and directories.

• A directory is like a folder: it contains pieces of paper, or files.
• A large folder can even hold other folders-directories can be
inside directories.
• In unix, the collection of directories and files is called the file
system. Initially, the file system consists of one directory,
called the “root” directory
• Inside the “root” directory, there are more directories, and
inside those directories are files and yet more directories.

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 • Each file and each directory has a name.
• A short name for a file could be joe,
• while it’s “full name” would be /home/larry/joe. The full
name is usually called the path.
• The path can be divide into a sequence of directories.
• For example, here is how /home/larry/joe is read:

/home/larry/joe
The initial slash indicates the root directory.
This signifies the directory called home. It is
inside the root directory.
The second slash corresponds to the
directory larry, which is inside home.

joe is inside larry.

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• A path could refer to either a directory or a filename, so joe
could be either.
• All the items before the short name must be directories.

Root Directory

Directory Directory home

Sub-Directory larry
Directory
structure File File joe

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• Looking at directories with Is

• The command ls lists files.

• If you try ls as a command, it will list the files (and
directories) contained in the current directory.

If you have
files, ls lists the
names of files
in the directory

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• If you want a list of files of a more active directory, try the
root directory.
/home/larry# ls /
bin etc install mnt root user var
dev home lib proc tmp usr vmlinux

“/” is a parameter saying what directory you want a list for. In

this case, it is the top level directory “/”
Some commands have special parameters called options or
switches. To see this try:
/home/larry# ls –F /
bin etc/ install/ mnt/ root/ user/ var/
dev/ home/ lib/ proc/ tmp/ usr/ vmlinux/

The -F is an option. It displays file types.

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• An option is a special kind of parameter that starts with a dash “-”
• An option modifies how the program runs, but not what the
program runs on.
• For ls, -F is an option that lets you see which things are
directories, which ones are special files, which are programs, and
which are normal files.
• Anything with a trailing slash “/” is a directory.
• ls -l file* displays files starting with “file”
• ls –l displays all details

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• Many unix commands are like ls.

• They have options, which are generally one

character after a dash, and they have
parameters.

• Unlike ls, some commands require certain

parameters and/or options. You have to learn
these commands.

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• pwd
• pwd (present working directory) tells you your
current directory.
– Most commands act, by default, on the current directory.
For instance, ls without any parameters displays the
contents of the current directory.

• cd
• cd is used to change directories.
• The format of this command :
cd new-directory (where new-directory is the name of
the new directory you want).

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• For instance, try:
/home/larry# cd /home
/home#

• If you omit the optional parameter directory, you’re

returned to your home, or original directory (the same as
typing cd ~ ). Otherwise, cd will change you to the specified
directory.

• There are two directories used only for relative pathnames:

• The directory “.” refers to the current directory
• The directory “..” refers to the parent directory of the
current directory
•The directory “..” is most useful moving back up a directory:
cd ..
•The command “cd –” will return you to the most recent 21
directory visited.
• mkdir
mkdir (make directory) is used to create a new directory,
• It can take more than one parameter, interpreting each
parameter as another directory to create.
• By default, it will create the new directory as a
subdirectory of the current directory
• rmdir
rmdir (remove directory) is used to remove a directory,
• rmdir will refuse to remove a non-existant directory,
as well as a directory that has anything in it.

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• Moving Information
• The primary commands for manipulating files under unix are
cp, mv, and rm. They stand for copy, move, and remove,
respectively.

• cp
• cp is used to copy contents of file1 to file2
cp file1 file2 (contents of file1 is copied to file2 in the same directory)
cp folder1/file1 folder2 (contents of file1 is copied to file1 in the
inside of folder2 directory)

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 • rm
• rm is used to remove a file.
– rm filename ---> removes a file named filename

• mv
• mv is used to move a file.
– mv filename /path/newname ---> moves a file
named filename to a new location, with a new name
• looks like cp, except that it deletes the original file after
copying it.
• mv will rename a file if the second parameter is a file. If the
second parameter is a directory, mv will move the file to the
new directory, keeping it’s shortname the same. 24
• Some Other UNIX Commands
• The Power of Unix

• The power of unix is hidden in small commands that

don’t seem too useful when used alone, but when
combined with other commands produce a system that’s
much more powerful, and flexible than most other
operating systems.
• The commands include sort, grep, more, cat, wc, spell,
diff, head, and tail.

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• Operating on Files

• In addition to the commands like cd, mv, and rm, you learned
in shell section, there are other commands that just operate on
files, but not the data in them.

• These include touch, chmod, du, and df.

• All of these commands don’t care what is in the file.

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Some of the things these commands manipulate:

• The time stamp: Each file has three dates associated with it.
These are creation time, last modification time and last access
time.

• The owner: the owner of files

• The group: the group of users

• The permissions: read, write, execute permissions of files. The

permissions tell unix who can access what file, or change it, or,
in the case of programs, execute it. Each of these permissions
can be toggled separately for the owner, the group, and all the
other users.

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 drwxr-xr-x 2 dag users 6 Dec 6 2016 file.txt
file name
group
owner

others
read, write, execute
permissions of files

• touch

• touch will update the time stamps of the files listed on

the command line to the current time.
• If a file doesn’t exist, touch will create it.

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• chmod

• chmod (change mode) is used to change the permissions

on a file.
(owner) (group) (others)
chmod [number][number][number] file1

Number = (read)4 + (write)2 + (execute)1

• Example: chmod 754 file1

for owner: read, write and execute permissions (4+2+1)

for group: read and execute permissions (4+0+1)
for others: only read permission (4+0+0)
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• chmod

• chmod can also be set in alpha mode (non-octal)

(owner) (group) (others)

chmod [user/group/others/all]operator[permission]
[file(s)]
operator can be +, -, or =

• Example: chmod u+rwx,g+rx,o+r file1

for owner: read, write and execute permissions (u+rwx)

for group: read and execute permissions (g+rx)
for others: only read permission (o+r)
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• System Statistics

• Commands in this section will display statistics about the

operating system, or a part of the operating system.

• du

du (disk usage) will count the amount of disk space for a given
directory, and all its subdirectories take up on the disk.
• df

df (disk filling) summarizes the amount of disk space in use.

For each file system, it shows the total amount of disk space, the
amount used, the amount available, and the total capacity of the
file system that’s used.
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• What’s in the File?
• There are two major commands used in unix for listing files,
cat, and more.

• cat
• cat shows the contents of the file.
cat [-nA] [file1 file2 . . . fileN]
• cat is not a user friendly command-it doesn’t wait for you to
read the file, and is mostly used in conjuction with pipes.
• However, cat does have some useful command-line options.
For instance, n will number all the lines in the file, and A will
show control characters.
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• more
• more is much more useful, and is the command that you’ll
want to use when browsing ASCII text files
more [-l] [+linenumber}] [file1 file2 ... fileN]
• The only interesting option is l, which will tell more that you
aren't interested in treating the character Ctrl-L} as a ``new
page'' character. more will start on a specified linenumber.

• head
head will display the first ten lines in the listed files.
head [- lines}] [l file1 file2 ... fileN]
• Any numeric option will be taken as the number of lines to
print, so head -15 frog will print the first fifteen lines of the
file frog
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• tail
• Like head, tail display only a fraction of the file.
• tail also accepts an option specifying the number of lines.
tail [-lines] [l file1 file2 ... fileN]

• file
• file command attempts to identify what format a particular
file is written in.
file [file1 file2 ... fileN]
• Since not all files have extentions or other easy to identify
marks, the file command performs some rudimentary
checks to try and figure out exactly what it contains.

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• Information Commands
• The commands that will alter a file, perform a certain
operation on the file, or display statistics on the file.

• grep
• grep is the generalized regular expression parser.
• This is a fancy name for a utility which can only search a text
file.
grep [-nvwx] [-number] { expression} [file1 file2 ... fileN]

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• wc
• wc (word count) simply counts the number of words, lines,
and characters in the file(s).
wc [-clw] [file1 file2 ... fileN]
• The three parameters, clw, stand for character, line, and
word respectively, and tell wc which of the three to count.
• spell
• spell is very simple unix spelling program, usually for
American English. spell is a filter, like most of the other
programs we’ve talked about.
spell [file1 file2 ... fileN]

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• diff
• The GNU version of diff has over twenty command line
options. It shows you what the differences are between
two files
• diff file1 file2

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 gzip [-v#] [file1 file2 ... fileN]
gunzip [-v] [file1 file2 ... fileN]
zcat [{file1 file2 ... fileN]

• These three programs are used to compress and decompress

data.

• gzip, or GNU Zip, is the program that reads in the original

file(s) and outputs files that are compressed, and therefore
smaller.

• gzip deletes the files specified on the command line and

replaces them with files that have an identical name except
that they have “.gz” appended to them.

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