Introduction to Linux

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Online

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Description

  • Type

    Course

  • Methodology

    Online

This course is a practical introduction to Unix and Linux, taught through their most popular incarnation: GNU/Linux. This course is delivered over 3 days and is a selected subset from our full public scheduled offering.

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Subjects

  • IT
  • Linux

Course programme

Introduction

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

The Unix and Linux command line

  • Unix shells (bash)
  • Command line syntax (options, arguments)
  • Shell variables and environment variables
  • Command substitution
  • Using pipes to connect programs
  • Useful text filters (wc, sort, uniq, expand, head, tail, nl, tac)
  • Spitting files across disks (split)
  • Using redirection to connect programs to files
  • Redirect into files with append (>>)

Documentation

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

Text editing with Vi

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

Configuration files

  • Configuration files
  • Environment variables for configuration (PATH, PS1, DISPLAY, http_proxy)
  • Setting and examining shell aliases
  • Configuring the readline library (inputrc files)

Regular expression searches

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

Processes and jobs

  • What processes are
  • The properties of a process
  • Parent processes and child processes
  • Job control (fg, bg, jobs)
  • Suspending processes (Ctrl+Z)
  • Running programs in the background (&)
  • Long-lived processes (nohup)
  • Monitoring processes (ps, pstree, top)
  • Killing processes and sending signals a process (kill, killall, xkill)
  • Process niceness/priority (nice, renice)

Filesystem concepts and use

  • The unified Unix filesystem
  • Special file types
  • Symbolic links (ln -s)
  • Inodes and directory entries
  • Hard links
  • Preserving links while copying and archiving
  • Where to put things: the FHS

Filesystem security

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

The X window system

  • What X is
  • The rôle of window managers and desktop environments
  • Startup and session scripts
  • Terminal emulators (xterm, etc)

Advanced shell usage

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

Scheduling

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

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Introduction to Linux

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The best Unix and Linux courses

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