Exercises for Linux Neophytes

Suggested "warm-up" for TSI students with no previous Linux experience

If you are familiar with Mac-OS/X or another species of UNIX, you probably already know the syntax of shell commands, or what Neal Stephenson famously called "... The Command Line".

However, if you have never used any operating system (OS) besides Windows, you probably are only accustomed to invoking applications by clicking on their icons on the desktop. There is nothing wrong with clicking on icons, but it has a limited syntax. In Linux, which is basically a free version of UNIX (so that both are often referred to collectively as "*nix") the shell command is the most common and versatile way of invoking applications or system utilities. So you need to have at least a rudimentary understanding of shell commands and their syntax to use a *nix system effectively.

Since all of the software we will be showcasing in the TSI data analysis workshops run on Linux, and all the workstations we will be providing are "Linux boxes", this means you need to familiarize yourself with Linux a bit before you arrive. The purpose of this introduction is to make that as simple as possible (but, to paraphrase Einstein, "no simpler").

As a first exercise, please peruse the following introduction to the Command Line Interface (also known as "The Terminal"):

Using The Terminal

Next you might want to check out some specific shell commands relevant to our µSR Data Analysis workshops:

Basic Linux Commands for µSR

Beyond that, you might get some guidance from the first few lectures, Assignments, Manuals and References from a second year undergraduate course I taught at UBC, Physics 210 ("Computational Physics"). Obviously that was a whole course, most of which is probably not relevant to your present needs; but the first few weeks of the course were devoted to familiarizing the students (most of whom had never seen Linux before) with the uses of a few bash commands to create, copy and remove directories and files, define customized commands of your own and invoke various utility programs and applications. We will be using the same workstations that were provided for that course.

If you run into any problems or deep confusion, feel free to contact me (for advice on the Physics 210 website) and/or Donald Arseneau (for advice on µSR utilities or Linux in general).

Jess H. Brewer
Last modified: Sat Jul 30 10:32:58 PDT 2011