Software Design
Unix Commands

Here is a list (borrowed from Prof. Karen Reid) of the Unix commands you should know how to use for this course. You can learn the basic options for them by typing man command at a Unix prompt, e.g. man head or man mv.

Basic Commands
man Documentation for commands.
cat Concatenate and display text files.
cd Change working directory.
clear Clear the screen.
cp Copy files and directories.
date Display the current date and time.
diff Show differences between two text files.
echo Print arguments.
env Show environment variables.
head Display the first few lines of a file.
lpr Send a file to a printer.
lprm Remove a print job from a printer's queue.
lpq Check the status of a printer's queue.
ls List files and directories.
mkdir Make directories.
more Page through a text file.
mv Move (rename) files and directories.
passwd Change your password.
pwd Print current working directory.
rm Remove files.
rmdir Remove directories.
sort Sort lines.
tail Display the last few lines of a file.
uniq Remove duplicate lines.
wc Count lines, words, and characters in a file.
who See who is logged in.
zip Package and compress files.
Advanced Commands
chmod Change file and directory permissions.
du Print the disk space used by files and directories.
grep Print lines matching a pattern.
gunzip Uncompress a file.
gzip Compress a file.
less A more intelligent more.
ps Display status of running processes.
tar Archive files.
which Find the path to a program.
Other Useful Things
Using a text editor. pico is the simplest one around, although many people prefer nedit, vi, or emacs.
Setting and inspecting environment variables (exactly how you do this depends on the shell you are using).
Using pipes to combine commands, and redirecting command output to files, as in ls *.java | wc or sort input.txt | uniq > output.txt

$Id: unix-commands.html,v 1.1 2005/01/04 21:59:00 reid Exp $