School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics

U NIVERSITY OF THE W ITWATERSRAND , J OHANNESBURG

COMS3008A: Parallel Computing

Linux tutorial

February 19, 2024

This tutorial presents a quick introduction to the basic command line operations in Linux Operating Systems.
The contents are based on [Eijkhout, 2015]. Students who are not familiar with Unix or Linux OS should
go over this tutorial. There are many Linux tutorials available online. A very easy to follow tutorial can
be found at [UBUNTU, 2023], and for a more comprehensive one, a book that is available to download for
free [Shotts, 2019].

1 Files
• The ls command gives you a list of files that are in your present location.

• Exercise: Try commands ls, ls -l, ls -s etc. What are the outcomes?

• You can read the man pages of Unix commands using man commandname. The man command puts
you in a mode where you can view long text documents. This viewer is common on Unix systems, so
memorize the following ways of navigating: Use the space bar to go forward, u key to go back up, g
to go to the beginning of the text, and G for the end, q to exit the viewer. If none of these is working,
ctrl-c will get you out.
• The cat command is often used to display files, but it can also be used to create simple content.

• Exercise: Type cat > newfilename (where you can pick any filename) and type some text. Conclude
with ctrl-d on a line by itself. Now use cat to view the contents of that file: cat newfilename.

• The touch command creates an empty file, updates the time-stamp of a file if it already exists. Use
ls -l to confirm this behavior.
• Three more useful commands for files are: cp for copying, mv for renaming, and rm for deleting.
Experiment with them.

1
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• For displaying parts of a file or information about a file, head, tail, more, wc commands are useful.
Experiment these commands on an existing text file. head displays the first couple of lines of a file, tail
the last, and more uses the same viewer that is used for man pages. The wc (‘word count’) command
reports the number of lines, words, characters in a file.

2 Directory
• The root of the Unix directory tree is indicated with a slash ‘/’.

• The pwd command gives you your current working directory.

• The mkdir command creates a new directory.

• Exercise: make a new directory with mkdir newdirectoryname.

• The cd (change directory) command moves you around different directories.

– cd without any arguments, takes you to your home directory.

– The single dot is the current directory, and the double dot is the directory one level back.
– Shortcuts for your home directory: cd, cd ∼, cd $HOME.
– cd <path>
– If you use cp to copy a directory, you need to add a flag -r to indicate you recursively copy the
contents.

3 Permissions
• Three types of actions can be taken with files or directories:

– reading r: any access to a file that does not change it.

– writing w: access to a file that changes its content.
– executing x: if the file is executable, to run it; if it is a directory, to enter it.

• Three classes of people who potentially access a file or a directory

– the user u: the person owning the file;

– the group g: a group of users to which the owner belongs;
– other o: everyone else.
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user group other

The permissions are rendered in sequence:
rwx rwx rwx
For instance rw-r--r-- means that the owner can read and write a file, the owner’s group and everyone
else can only read.
Permissions are also rendered numerically in groups of 3 bits, by letting r = 4 (or 100 in binary),
w = 2 (010), x = 1 (001).
• You can set permission by chmod < permission > file for one file or chmod -R < permission > directory
for a directory recursively. Examples:
chmod 766 filename
chmod g+w filename
chmod g=wx filename
chmod o-w filename
chmod g+r, o-x filename

4 Text searching
• The grep command can be used to search for a text in a file.
• Exercise: search for the letter q in your text file with grep q yourfile and search for it in all files in
your directory with grep q *. Try some other searches.
• In addition to searching for literal strings, you can look for more general expressions.
ˆ the beginning of the line
$ the end of the line
· any character
* any number of repetitions
[xyz] any of characters xyz
• More examples: you can find
– All lines that start with an ‘a’ with grep “ˆa” yourfile
– All lines that end with a digit with grep “[0-9]$” yourfile.
Exercise: Construct the search strings for finding
– lines that start with an uppercase character
– line that contain exactly one character.
• The stream editor sed is a tool for processing text files on a line-by-line basis. For instance
sed ‘s/foo/bar/’ myfile >mynewfile
will apply the substitute command s/foo/bar to every line of myfile, i.e. search for foo in every line
and replace it with bar. The output is then redirected (the expression >) to a new file.
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5 Command execution
• How Unix determines what to do when you type a command name? Search paths: If you type a
command such as ls, the shell actually goes searching for a program by the name ls. This means that
you can have multiple different commands with the same name, and which one gets executed depends
on which one is found first. The locations where Linux (or Unix) searches for commands is the ‘search
path’, which is stored in the environment variable PATH.
• Exercise: Do echo $PATH. Add your own path to the search path by export PATH=``yourpath:$PATH''.
• How to feed one command into another? And how to connect commands to input and output files? Use
redirection and pipelines.
– Output redirection: More usefully, grep string yourfile > outfile will take what normally
goes to the terminal and send it to outfile. The output file is created if it didn’t already exist,
otherwise it is overwritten. To append, use grep text yourfile >> outfile.
– Exercise: Take one of the grep commands from the previous section, and send it to a file. Check
that the contents of the file are identical to what appeared on your screen before. Search for a
string that does not appear in the file and send the output to a file. What happens?
– Standard files: Unix has three standard files that handle input and output.
* stdin is the file that provides input for processes.
* stdout is the file where the output of a process is written.
* stderr is the file where error output is written.
In an interactive session, all three files are connected to the user terminal. Using input or output
redirection then means that the input is taken or output is sent to a different file than the terminal.
– Command redirection: Instead of taking input from a file, or sending output to a file, it is possible
to connect two commands together, so that the second command takes the output of the first as
input. The syntax for this is commandone | commandtwo, and this is called pipeline. For example,
grep a myfile | grep b finds all lines that contains both an a and a b.
Exercise: Construct a pipeline that counts how many lines there are in your file that contains the
string th. Use the wc command to do the counting.
• Processes: The Unix operating system can run many programs at the same time, by rotating through
the list and giving each only a fraction of a second to run each time. The command ps can tell you
everything that is currently running.
• Exercise: Type ps. How many programs are currently running? By default, ps gives you only the
programs that you explicitly started. Do ps guwax for a detailed list of everything that is running. How
many programs are running? How many belongs to the root, how many to you? (You can use pipeline
here.) Usually, you can kill a running process by using kill processnumber command.
Finally, the Unix shells are also programming environments. You can learn more about this aspect of Unix by
finding an online tutorial.
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References
[Eijkhout, 2015] Eijkhout, V. (2015). Introduction to High Perforamnce Scientific Computing. 2nd edition.

[Shotts, 2019] Shotts, W. (2019). The linux command line. http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php. Ac-
cessed 2024-2-19.

[UBUNTU, 2023] UBUNTU (2023). The linux command line for beginner. https://ubuntu.com/
tutorials/command-line-for-beginners#9-conclusion. Accessed 2024-2-19.