Introduction to UnixPart 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 UnixIBM’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 serversDatabase serversSupercomputers/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

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux• Fedora• SUSE Linux Enterprise• openSUSE• Debian GNU/Linux• Ubuntu• Mandriva Linux• Slackware Linux • Gentoo

Components of Unix

Shells Kernel

Shells

System Utilities

End-UserUtilities

Developmenttools

Docs

Commands

MCSR Unix Workshops Will Cover:

Shells Kernel

Shells

System Utilities

End-UserUtilities

Developmenttools

Docs

Commands

jsujsu

tracct1tracct1 tracct2tracct2 r1311r1311

Unix/Linux File System

Similar to MS/DOS Files (Windows Command Prompt):

Differences

Windows LinuxCase doesn’t matter Case sensitiveSpaces ok in filenames Spaces not OK in namesBackslash used in pathnames Forward slash in pathsUser “Administrator” User “root”

Unix/Linux File Permissions

Unix/Linux File Permissions