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jzalinger edited this page Jul 18, 2011 · 7 revisions

Useful Unix

A good place to find lots of information for beginners is [here](http://vic.gedris.org/Manual-ShellIntro/1.2/ShellIntro.pdf).

Using the terminal/emacs will be a lot less painful if you know the shortcuts/commands.

Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Ctrl + ‘a’: go to the beginning of the line.
  • Ctrl + ‘e’: go to the end of the line.
  • Ctrl + ‘d’: delete forward one character.
  • Ctrl + ‘c’: cancel currently running program or command.
  • Ctrl + ‘k’: “kill” the current line, which deletes all characters from the cursor to the end of the line
  • Ctrl + ‘w’: delete backwards one word.

Scripts

Scripts are really useful. They’re all the .sh files you find in our scripts folder. To run a script just do ./scriptname.sh in the directory with the script or path/to/script/scriptname.sh for a full-path to the script in any terminal. The dot in the first version just means current directory. The way to think of scripts is just a batch of operations that will run under the terminal in a certain sequence. So instead of running them one by one by hand, the script will tell the shell to run them. If you ever have a process that you would want to automate, write a script! A good intro with examples are [here](http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html). You can also look through our scripts in the script folder to see what they’re about.

Other Page Links

Beginner's Guide

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