UNIX was created in the late 1960s, in an effort to provide a multiuser, multitasking system for use by programmers. The philosophy behind the design of UNIX was to provide simple, yet powerful utilities that could be pieced together in a flexible manner to perform a wide variety of tasks.
UNIX is an operating system. The job of an operating system is to orchestrate the various parts of the computer -- the processor, the on-board memory, the disk drives, keyboards, video monitors, etc. -- to perform useful tasks. The operating system is the master controller of the computer, the glue that holds together all the components of the system, including the administrators, programmers, and users. When you want the computer to do something for you, like start a program, copy a file, or display the contents of a directory, it is the operating system that must perform those tasks for you.
In order to use UNIX, you will have to know the format of the commands. UNIX runs much like MS-DOS, and some of the basic commands are below:
| ls |
Displays
everything in the current directory |
| ls -a |
Displays all files, including hidden |
| ls -l |
Displays all
files, along with the size and timestamp |
| tar -zxpf <file.tar.gz> |
Uncompresses
tar.gz files |
| tar -xpf <file.tar.gz> |
Uncompresses .tar
files |
| gunzip
<file> |
Uncompresses .gz
files |
| cp
<file> |
Copies a file to
a new file |
| mv
<file> |
Moves a file to a
new file, or rename |
| mkdir
<dir> |
Creates a
directory |
| rmdir
<dir> |
Deletes a
directory |
| rm
<file> |
Deletes a file |
| rm -rf
<dir> |
Deletes a
directory |
| cd <dir> |
Moves to a
directory |
| cd .. |
Moves to a lower
directory |
| cd ~ |
Moves to your
home directory |
| cd - |
Moves to the
previous directory |
| pwd |
Displays the
current directory |
| pico
<file> |
Edits a file |
| ftp
<site> |
Connect to a FTP
server |
| lynx
<site> |
View a webpage |
| df |
Displays the hard
drive stats |
| quota |
Displays your
quota |
| uptime |
Displays the
uptime of the server |
| uname -a |
Displays the
operating system stats |
| whoami |
Displays your
info |
| who |
Displays others
connected to the server |
| last |
Displays the last
login |
| whereis
<file> |
Tells where a
file is located |
| BitchX |
IRC Client |
| mail |
Check your email |
| ps -x |
Displays
processes your running |
| ps -a |
Displays all
processes running |
| ps -ux |
Displays running
processes, with CPU/Memory usage |
| kill <pid> |
Kills a process |
| kill -9 <pid> |
Kills an eggdrop
process |
| killall
<program> |
Kills all running
process of the same type |
| whatis
<command> |
Description of
commands |
| man
<command> |
Displays help on
the command |
