More how to get a good
shell account...
Now that you have chosen your shell, the next thing is to
explore. See what riches your ISP has allowed you to use. For
that you will want to learn, and I mean *really learn* your most
important Unix commands and auxiliary programs. Because I am
supreme arbiter of what goes into these Guides, I get to decide
what the most important commands are. Hmm, "ten" sounds
like a famous number. So you're going to get the:
Ten Meinel Hall of Fame Shell Account Exploration Tools
1) man <command name>
This magic command brings up the online Unix manual. Use
it on each of the commands below, today! Wonder what all the
man command options are? Try the "man -k" option.
2) ls
Lists files. Jericho suggests "Get people in the habit of
using "ls -alF". This will come into play down
the road for security-conscious users." You'll see a huge
list of files that you can't see with the "ls" command
alone, and lots of details. If you see such a long list of files
that they scroll off the terminal screen, one way to solve the
problem is to use "ls -alF|more."
3) pwd
Shows what directory you are in.
4) cd <directory>
Changes directories. Kewl directories to check out include
/usr, /bin and /etc. For laughs, jericho suggests exploring
in /tmp.
5) more <filename>
This shows the contents of text files. Also you might be able
to find "less" and "cat" which are similar
commands. Using "cat" is more complicated than "less"
and "more". It just dumps everything to the screen
all at once if you type "cat <filename>". However,
there are a lot of other cool things it does. Give the command
"man cat" to learn more.
6) whereis <program name>
Think there might be a nifty program hidden somewhere? Maybe
a game you love? This will find it for you. Similar commands
are "find" and "locate." Try them all for
extra fun.
7) vi
An editing program. You'll need it to make your own files and
when you start programming while in your shell account. You can
use it to write a really lurid file for people to read when they
finger you. Or try "emacs." It's another editing program
and IMHO more fun than vi. Other editing programs you may find
include "ed" (an ancient editing program which I have
used to write thousands of lines of Fortran 77 code), "ex,"
"fmt," "gmacs," "gnuemacs," and
"pico."
8) grep
Extracts information from files, especially useful for seeing
what's in syslog and shell log files. Similar commands are "egrep,"
"fgrep," and "look."
9) chmod <filename>
Change file permissions.
10) rm <filename>
Delete file. If you have this command you should also find "cp"
for copy file, and "mv" for move file.
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