Introduction to Unix
Part 1
Research Computing Workshops
Office of Information Technology
&
Mississippi Center for
Supercomputing Research
Jason Hale & Susan Lukose
Unix is an Operating System
An O/S manages access to the resources of a computer.
O/S host applications, shielding
them from the hardware.
Other popular operating systems:
Windows XP, Windows Vista,
MAC OS X
Unix looks more like DOS
than Windows
Common Flavors of Unix
IBM’s AIX
Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX.
Sun’s Solaris
SGI’s IRIX
Apple’s MAC OS X
Unix Variants: Linux, BSD, …
Why Learn Unix/Linux?
Unix/Linux commonly used on computer “servers”:
Web servers
Database servers
Supercomputers/Clusters
Over 50% of servers in corporations run Unix or Linux
A little Unix experience goes a long way, on the job,
and looking for a job
Why Learn Unix/Linux?
At UM/MCSR:
- to run Computational CHEM and STAT apps
- more disk space than on your PC’s
- run one calculation for several days
- for calculations too big for your PC or MAC
Student programming assignments may be
completed on MCSR/UM systems
Distributions of Linux
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Fedora
SUSE Linux Enterprise
openSUSE
Debian GNU/Linux
Ubuntu
Mandriva Linux
Slackware Linux
Gentoo
Components of Unix
Shells
Commands
System
Utilities
End-User
Utilities
Kernel
Shells
Docs
Development
tools
MCSR Unix Workshops Will Cover:
Shells
Commands
System
Utilities
End-User
Utilities
Kernel
Shells
Docs
Development
tools
jsu
tracct1
tracct2
r1311
Unix/Linux File System
Similar to MS/DOS Files (Windows Command Prompt):
Differences
Windows
Case doesn’t matter
Spaces ok in filenames
Backslash used in pathnames
User “Administrator”
Linux
Case sensitive
Spaces not OK in names
Forward slash in paths
User “root”
Unix/Linux File Permissions
Unix/Linux File Permissions