Okay, okay, so not a great name, but at least it's not taken.
What if you had to learn Unix in a hurry? At least enough to become productive? This set of training units should help. Read this if you're a Mac user and consider yourself an inspired beginner at Unix who simply doesn't know where to start. This is based on materials targeted to my 14-year-old daughter, and perhaps you can find a few clues of that.
While most programmers know Unix, it's not just for them. You can apply the skills you learn here if you have to grapple with a wide variety of text processing tasks. You may benefit if you're any kind of writer, or have to do research on any kind of data, or if you have to keep track of a bunch of stuff, or even if you work with programmers and want to keep an eye on what they're up to, the scoundrels.
Go through each lesson's steps in the order below, making sure to type out each command to get used to it, get it into your fingers, and to understand the output interactively. The text also calls out common bits of Unix jargon, for your reference, if you're into that sort of thing.
By the end, you should be able to create intelligent tools and design your own workflows when working in a collaborative environment. You should also be able to add geek to your resume.
Here's what's in each section:
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Getting Started shows you how to set up the Mac's Terminal application.
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Navigating tells you how to see stuff, find out where you are, move around, and open stuff. (Commands you'll learn about:
ls,pwd,cd,touch,open,man) -
Managing tells you how to copy, move, and remove stuff. (
cp,mv,rm,mkdir,rmdir,history,rsync) -
Inspecting shows you how to display files, search for stuff in them, and compare them. (
cat,more,less,head,tail,grep,wc,diff) -
Manipulating shows how to dump stuff into files, and how to chain commands together to create interesting new stuff. By the end, you should be able to search a directory structure, limiting search results to a particular kind of file. (
echo,find,sort,uniq,mail) -
Filtering shows you how to delete stuff or transform it into different stuff. By the end, you should be able to apply batch change scripts. (
sed) -
Reusable Tools shows you how to create your own shortcuts and utilities to make your life easier. By the end, you should be able to write an automated script that notifies you of changes to a file that other people might be working on. (
alias,source,export,sh,chmod,crontab, plus shell-script commands such asfor,do,done,if,then,else,fi)
Once you get to those last three sections, you should be able to design some powerful commands of your own. However, every effort was made to ignore anything more esoteric having to do with administering your computer or networks.
What if you have to edit a bunch of text files quickly? After learning the basics of Unix, do a deep dive into the Emacs text editor and the regular expressions that can make it and other text editors so powerful. (Note that Emacs has a Windows client, so anyone can benefit from both of these.)
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Emacs walks you through all the major features of the Emacs text editor. By the end, you should be able to make changes to many source files at once. Even if you don't end up editing text files in Emacs, you should at least be aware of the powerful editing features you should come to expect. This unit is designed to make you into a very productive snob.
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Regexp shows you how to design flexible pattern-matching searches in Emacs. By the end, you should be able to build a regular expression that detects passive-voice constructions.