Goals
- Get you comfortable with the process of using a command-line interface
(also known as a command shell) to perform tasks on a computer.
- Learn a dozen or so of the most common and most important Unix command-line commands.
What to do?
Go to this Unix tutorial
and work through:
This tutorial was originally written at the University of Surrey
(note the British spellings of "behaviour" and "customise," for example), and has been lightly
edited to match what we do at Carleton. The tutorial is pretty old, but it's still valid, and it's the
best simple introduction to the Unix command line that I've seen.
Is there anything to hand in?
Please post one question about something you'd like to understand better in the
Slack #questions channel.
Suggestions
By the end of the tutorial, you should be able to walk comfortably through the following steps:
- Login to your account on a macOS computer (your own or one of the Macs in Weitz 138,
CMC 304, CMC 306, or CMC 102).
- Launch the Terminal application.
- Create a subdirectory of your home directory to contain your work for a
CS 111 assignment, say "assignment1".
- Change directories to your new directory.
- Launch BBEdit or some other text editor and create a simple Python program
containing:
print 'hello, world!'
- Save your program as "hello.py" in the new directory.
- Back in the Terminal, run your program with the command
python3 hello.py
Start early, have fun, and don't hesitate to post #questions on Slack or ask in person.