Introduction to Linux

This course provide a thorough introduction to UNIX and LINUX covering basic operating system concepts, and gives a solid grounding in UNIX command, utilities and shell features.

As with all Linux courses, this course makes extensive use of practical exercises and draws heavily on our trainers' own experience if implementing Linux based e-commerce solutions

Day 1

Lesson 1 Introduction

• What is Linux, Logging in typing commands, logging out
• Files, directories and paths, Creating Files with a text editor
• Viewing files (cat,less) and Managing Files (cp,mv,rm)
• Magic dot files and hidden files, Managing directories (mkdir, rmdir)
• Documentation for commands (man) and Useful shell features (command-line editing, command line completion history)

Lesson 2 The Unix and Linux command Line

• Unix shells (bash), Command line syntax (options, arguments)
• Shell variables and environment variables and Command Substitution
• Using pipes to connect programmes
• Useful text fillers (wc, sort, uniq, expand, head, tail, nl,tac)
• Spitting files across disks (split), Using redirection to connect programs to files and redirect in to files with append (≻≻)

Lesson 3 Documentation

• The unfortunate diversity of Linux documentation
• Using man(1), How man pages are divided among ‘sections'
• Searching for man pages (apropos, man -k), Printing man pages (man -t)
• Documentation for shell built-ins (help), Using GNU info documentation (info) and Documentation under/usr/share/doc

Lesson 4 Text Editing with Vi

• Unix is all about text, Vi: the standard Unix editor
• The concept of ‘modes' in a modal editor and Vi clones, extendiond to vi
• Other powerful Unix text editors and practical work learning Vi and Vim

Day 2

Lesson 1 Configuration Files

• Configuration files and environment variables for configuration (PATH, PSI, DISPLAY, http_proxy)
• Setting and examining shell aliases and configuring the readline library (inputrc files)

Lesson 2 Regular Expression Searches

• Searching files wih regular expression (grep) and the concept of ‘pattern making' with regular expressions
• Anchor the pattern to the start of end o the line (＾, $), Match repeated patterns (*,\+, ?) and escaping special characters in regexps (\)
• Matching any character (.) and matching alternative patterns (\])
• Simple use of sed to ‘search and replace

Lesson 3 Processes and Jobs

• What processes are, the properties of a process and parent processes and child processes
• Job control (fg, bg, jobs), suspending processes (Ctrl+Z) and running Programmes in the background (&)
• Long Lived processes (nohup) and monitoring processes (ps,pstree, top)
• Killing proceses and sending signals a process (kill, killal, xkill)
• Process niceness/priority (nice,renice)

Lesson 4 Filesystem and Concepts and Use

• The unified Unix filesystem, special file types and symbolic links (In -s)
• Inodes and directory enteries, hard links and preserving links while copying and archiving and where to put things: the FHS

Day 3

Lesson 1 Filesystem Security

• Users and groups, the ‘root' user, or superuser
• Changing file ownership (chown) and changing group ownership (chgrp)
• More complex ways of changing ownership (recursively, changing owner and group simultaneously) Permissions on files and permissions on directories,how permissions are applied and changing permissions (chmod)
• The special ‘sicky bit' mode on directories, Setgid and setuid permissions, their effect on files and directories and default permissions for new files (umask)

Lesson 2 The X Window System

• What X is and the role of the window managers and deskop environments
• Startup and session scripts and terminal emulators (xterm, etc)

Lesson 3 Advance Shell Usage

• Quoting (single quotes, double quotes, blackslashes)
• Combining quoting mechanisms and globbing patterns (*,?,[])
• Generating filenames and other text with {} braces

Lesson 4 Scheduling

• Running commands at particular times (at,atq,atrm)
• Scheduling commands to run repeatedly (cron)
• Different ways of configuring cron (/etc/crontab, etc) and User crontabs (crontab command)