UNIX Tutorial for Beginners

These tutorials are derived from the excellent tutorials from the University of Surrey, UK, with some minor modifications for our site. The originals can be found here.

Typographical Conventions

Introduction to The UNIX operating system

Tutorial One

• Listing files and directories
• Making Directories
• Changing to a different Directory
• The directories . and ..
• Pathnames
• More about home directories and pathnames

Tutorial Two

• Copying Files
• Moving Files
• Removing Files and directories
• Displaying the contents of a file on the screen
• Searching the contents of a file

Tutorial Three

• Redirection
• Redirecting the Output
• Redirecting the Input
• Pipes

Tutorial Four

• Wildcards
• Filename Conventions
• Getting Help

Tutorial Five

• File system security (access rights)
• Changing access rights
• Processes and Jobs
• Listing suspended and background processes
• Killing a process

Tutorial Six

• Other Useful UNIX commands

Tutorial Seven

• Compiling UNIX software packages
• Download source code
• Extracting source code
• Configuring and creating the Makefile
• Building the package
• Running the software
• Stripping unnecessary code

Tutorial Eight

• UNIX variables
• Environment variables
• Shell variables
• Using and setting variables

UNIX Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• These seven articles contain the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions often seen in comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell.

History of UNIX

• UNIX was originally developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people. Read all about the history of its creation.

This tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The original version was prepared and is copyrighted by Michael Stonebank of the University of Surrey, UK.