All about Unix

I have been teaching Unix for a few years to all sorts of different people. There is are an incredible amount of unix tutorials on the web, but many of them miss the interconnection of all the different tools which really make this unix environment so powerful and so loved. This is a collection of documents I have created in trying to answer specific problems which I have come across in my classes, and to try to get people to 'get it'.

I am sure there are many mistakes in these documents as they are all in a constant state of improvement. You have been warned :)

-- Marco Scoffier

Basic Commands: Explainations of the basic Unix commands and the beginning of the Unix mentality. Unix was created by programmers for programmers. Everyone using a computer should become a little bit of a programmer, when using the awesome unix command-line a whole programming environment is at your finger-tips.
How to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome: shortcuts: No one feels comfortable using a tool until they have a handful of personal accelerators for daily actions. The UNix command line is built full of short-cuts, most are so common to those who use them that they hardly mention them. Here are presented a handfull of shortcuts I use constantly.
A shell script is a text file is a computer program: Shell scripts are just text files. A computer program can be a shell script. Learn how to make a shell program and how it interacts with the unix environment.
Inodes: Inodes are part of the magic that allows everything in unix to be a flat text file. They are often misunderstood, here is an atempt at explaining things without getting too bogged down in the details.
Partitions: Partitions are not always well understood, but can make a huge difference for a well engineered system
Permissions and the sticky bit: The "sticky bit" is one of the least understood of the permissions bits. This exercize will hopefully help you understand what it is all about.
Searching and Replacing in VI: Mastering a text editor is one of the biggest favors you could ever do yourself in your computing life. The vi editor seems paritcularly archane, and will remain so until you understand how it's minimal syntax can do really powerful things. There are many places on the web where you can find the basic vi commands, here you will discover one of the more powerful means of running small regular expressions on you texts, and making that text into commands for your system.

some unfinished things and notes

A walk-through of Gnu's make command
Very beginning of VI
Anootated shell scripts: Here are a bunch of shell scripts, small programs which automate different parts of your daily activities on your computer. Some are meant to be easy to help you understand what this is all about, others more complicated so that you can get on your way to writing bigger things
Preferences: .vimrc: This is my .vimrc file. There are numerous ways of modernising vi(m). Colorizing, syntax highlighting, line numbering, you can pick and choose among these entries to create your own custom vi prefernences file or .vimrc