This assignment should be uploaded to Homework 1 on moodle by 11:55 PM on 31 January. If you submit your homework with moodle, you should consider submitting with a PDF or spreadsheet.
The purpose of this homework is to get everyone at the level of experienced command line user before the third week of the course.
There will be a second homework that will ask some deviously hard “how to” questions for bash.
The reading
Read (quickly) Part 1, “Learning the Shell”, of The Linux command line: A Complete Introduction by William E. Shotts, Jr. This book can be read on-line from the library or downloaded from the author’s web site LinuxCommand.org.
The task
As you read through Part 1, execute almost all the commands. There will be a few commands, such as chown and sudo, that you will not be able to do because you lack administrator privileges. There might be other times when the command variations just get to be a bit too much.
What to turn in?
That’s a good question, but enough to convince me you make it through Part 1. Forms of supported evidence include the following:
- A copy of your .bash_history file showing your recently typed commands. You can edit it to remove commands unrelated to this assignment, but just leave the typos in the file.
- The transcript of your terminal session created with
script. This involves starting with
a command similar to:
script sysadmhw1.txt
and then submitting the file sysadmhw1.txt. Don’t try to read sysadmhw1.txt. It will be full of terminal escape sequences. - If you have experience using the command line, submit some prose describing your experiences going through Part 1. You can mention the new commands or command options you learned.