Introduction to UNIX

More than 50 years after its introduction as a research operating system within Bell Labs in 1970, the UNIX operating system, in its many flavors, remains a major and venerble player, especially in for servers.

Although, like other modern operating systems, it has a graphical user interface (GUI), as a matter of tradition and minizing requirements, many interact with it using a text-based command line interface. Users of the shell in OS X will likely find it familiar -- as OS X's shell is derived from and modelled after it. Users of Windows systems will find it similar to Windows own command-line interface, but will find that there are also many differences, as the two were developed to meet the same requirements for a text-based command-line interface, but did so differently.

A good primer can be found in Garrel's Introduction to Linux: A Hands on Guide, which is part of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP):

Introduction to Linux: A Hands-On Guide (Garrels)

In particular, chapters 2 and 3 should give you a really good understanding of how to do every day things:

• Chapter 2: Quickstart
• Chapter 3: About files and the file system

The following is a really good quick-reference for UNIX commands, including commands associated with the AFS file system that we use at CMU. The next section covers more about AFS:

• UNIX Command Reference (CMU Computing Services)