Beyond the Mouse Lecture 7: Unix Tools 1
October 17
Instructor: Jeff Freymueller
x7286 Elvey 413B jfreymueller@alaska.eduTA: Shanshan Li
Last Updated: October 10, 2017
Introduction to the Unix (-like) operating system. This lecture briefly touches the basics of command line magic, shell scripts, piping, and subshells.
Lecture
Lab
Some funky unix tool and shell games
Examples
Examples are in the slides. Be careful copying and pasting from the slides, as PPT quotes might be different characters than the ones needed in the shell! I think I fixed them all, but be aware.
Other Resources
The website explainshell.com lets you enter a shell command including all of its various arguments, and it explains to you what part each does. It supports more than 29000 different commands, based on Ubuntu Linux's manpage repository.
If you want to look at a more advanced discussion of some of the subtleties of filenames and wildcards in the shell, check out this webpage.
You might have heard about the "Shellshock" bug, which affected numerous webservers a couple of years ago. It was a really serious bugs that causes really serious security holes on all Linux/unix machines. Shellshock is a bug in the code for the bash shell that had been around since it was first written, but it only became revealed last year. It was most likely fixed on the majority of affected machines before it could be seriously exploited. Windows, by the way, has had far more security holes thus far, but shellshock shows that all systems are potentially vulnerable.
Dr. Jeffrey T. Freymueller
Professor of Geophysics
Geophysical Institute
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK 99775-7320