The Unix Shell
Registration: Please visit the OIT website
Place: The Edge Workshop Room, Bostock Library, Duke University
Time: 9:00 AM - 12.00 PM, Oct 27th 2015
This Duke-OSG event is being run by the open science grid (OSG), in collaboration with⋅ Software Carpentry⋅ and Duke Research Computing. The⋅ Open Science Grid (OSG) is a national scale distributed infrastructure for⋅ scientific computing. Software Carpentry's mission is to help scientists and engineers⋅ become more productive by teaching them basic lab skills for computing like program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Duke Research Computing offers⋅ services that are useful to research computing “as it is practiced” across Duke and⋅ often in collaboration with researchers at other institutions.
The Unix shell has been around longer than most of its users have been alive. It has survived so long because it's a power tool that allows people to do complex things with just a few keystrokes. More importantly, it helps them combine existing programs in new ways and automate repetitive tasks so that they don't have to type the same things over and over again. Use of the shell is fundamental to using a wide range of other powerful tools and computing resources (including "high-performance computing" supercomputers). These lessons will start you on a path towards using these resources effectively.
Setup Instructions
- We will do all the exercises on
login.duke.ci-connect.net. - If you do not have an account on
duke.ci-connect, please sign up. - You have an account on `duke.ci-connect but forgot the password, click here.
- You also need
SSHinstalled on your laptop. For details, follow this link
Prerequisites
This lesson guides you through the basics of file systems and the shell. If you have stored files on a computer at all and recognize the word “file” and either “directory” or “folder” (two common words for the same thing), you're ready for this lesson.
NOTE
If you're already comfortable manipulating files and directories,
searching for files with grep and find, and writing simple loops
and scripts, you probably won't learn much from this lesson.
Getting ready
You need to download some files to follow this lesson. Log into your account
on login.duke.ci-connect.net and download the zipped filesystem using wget:
$ wget http://swc-osg-workshop.github.io/2015-10-27-duke/data/filesystem.zip
Alternatively, if you are doing these exercises on your local desktop or laptop, you can download the filesystem by clicking this link.⋅
Unpack the zipped files - on Windows or a Mac, you can probably just double-click or click the downloaded file to unpack it. On linux you can type in a command like
$ unzip filesystem.zip