Unix II: Applied Unix (3 days)

Synopsis

Unix II Tools is for anyone who wants to increase their productivity by taking advantage of the tools that come with Unix. This is a course for the programmer, administrator, or power user. This class builds on basic Unix knowledge, going beyond the minimum to gain the maximum advantage from the Unix desktop. Tools and techniques that save time and trouble are emphasized. Traditional Unix power tools such as sed, awk, grep, and others are detailed, with many tricks, tips, and obscure but useful features explained.

All of the concepts presented in this course are reinforced with numerous hands-on labs and exercises.

Target audience

This course is appropriate for UNIX users, managers, system analysts and application developers.

Prerequisites Fundamentals of Unix or equivalent experience. This course is not for the casual user.
Lab exercises
  • customizing vi with macros and abbreviations
  • searching with grep and egrep
  • sorting on multiple keys
  • composing regular expressions
  • writing sed scripts to manipulate text data
  • writing awk scripts for data extraction
  • customizing shell command history
  • creating personal shell functions
  • configuring FTP for automatic login and data transfer
  • installing and configuring gzip
  • creating and submitting a cron table
  • encrypting/decrypting a file with PGP
  • running remote X programs
Links Some links to sites a shell programmer may find useful

Unix II course outline

1. The building blocks

  • Unix architecture
  • Navigation commands
  • File and directory commands
  • Standard I/O
  • Permissions

2. Becoming a vi master

  • A review of the essentials
  • vi objects
  • Filtering text through external commands
  • Abbreviations
  • Macros
  • vi configuration
  • vi emulators

3. File processing tools

  • Paging programs
  • The grep family
  • egrep
  • Using the sort program
  • Sorting on multiple fields
  • Translating with tr

4. Regular expressions

  • Character classes
  • Anchoring searches
  • Quantifiers
  • Advanced REs
  • Remembering subexpressions
  • Ignoring case

5. Using the stream editor

  • sed overview
  • Command line options
  • Line addresses
  • Simple sed tasks
  • Search and replace with sed

6. Text processing with awk

  • awk overview
  • Basic patter/action format
  • Command line options
  • pattern matching
  • Variables
  • Writing awk scripts

7. The Korn shell for Power Users

  • Unix shells
  • Shell options
  • Using shell history effectively
  • Saving keystrokes
  • Shell functions
  • Using the for loop
  • Korn shell math

8. Networking utilities

  • ftp overview
  • ftp autologin
  • ftp macros
  • Trusted access overview
  • rsh, rcp, and rlogin

9. Installing and configuring freeware

  • Software installation issues
  • Categories of freeware
  • Building freeware from source
  • Understanding make
  • Must-have freeware
  • Other interesting freeware packages

10. Process scheduling

  • Properties of processes
  • Monitoring and killing processes
  • Configuring cron
  • Using at

11. Printing tools

  • Basic System 5 and BSD print commands
  • Useful options
  • PostScript overview
  • Using gs
  • Using mpage

12. Encryption and data security

  • Data security overview
  • Creating PGP keys
  • Storing other user's keys
  • Encrypting files
  • Decrypting files

13. Using and configuring X

  • X architecture
  • X servers
  • Window managers
  • X startup
  • X resources
  • Running remote X programs

14. Linux -- the ultimate power tool

  • Linux overview
  • Where to get Linux
  • Installation overview
  • Steps in installation
  • TCP/IP configuration
  • What can you do with Linux?
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