Learning

Objectives
Learners will be able to…
1. Identify what tasks/functions an operating system does.
1. Describe the history of Unix systems
1. Use the appropriate commands on the terminal to change directories, list
the contents of a directory, and list the contents of a file.
What is an Operating System?
The operating system (OS) is the software that sits between the computer
hardware and the applications running on a computer.

The User interacts with applications which interact with the

operating system which interacts with hardware

Most modern operating systems (e.g. MacOS, iOS, Android, Microsoft

Windows) provide a graphical user interface, but some only provide a text-
based interface.

Try out interacting with the text-based interface on the left

by typing echo "Welcome to Unix" and pressing the Enter or
Return key.

You should see Welcome to Unix print out below the command you
typed.
You can try printing out other phrases by replacing the text in the
double quotes like so: echo "Are you ready?".

Operating systems allow users to multi-task - for example, you can watch a
video and receive texts at the same time - by carefully managing a wide
range of system resources.
What does an operating system do?
Manage memory allocation for running applications
Process scheduling; managing CPU (central processing unit) allocation
for running processes
Manage data storage
File management
Manage Input/Output (I/O), specifically process input from devices such
as keyboards and touchpads, send output to a display
Manage peripherals such as printers and scanners

Unix is a multi-user operating system. Under Unix, each user can access
and share system resources such as memory. In contrast, other operating
systems, like Windows, start a new session with distinct resources for each
user.
The UNIX operating system
The first implementation of UNIX was developed at Bell Labs, a division of
AT&T, in 1969. It was first developed for the PDP-7, a mini-computer from
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was then rewritten in assembly
language for the DEC PDP-11.

The C programming language, one of the first high-level programming

languages, was also developed at Bell Labs and in 1973 much of the UNIX
kernel was rewritten in C. The fact that UNIX was written in a high-level
language, rather than assembly language, meant it could be ported to other
hardware systems without a complete rewrite. This is easy to imagine now
- consider how a single app on the App Store (for iPhones/iPads) or the Play
Store (for Android phones and tablets) can work across different phones
and tablets.

Also, because C was written with the idea of using it for implementing the
UNIX kernel, it was designed to be small and efficient, ideal features for an
operating system.

Expanding out
AT&T was deemed by the US government to be a monopoly, and one
consequence was that they were not allowed to sell the UNIX operating
system. Since they could not sell UNIX, AT&T leased the OS, including the
source code, to universities. With access to the code, computer science
students could learn about the operating system and experiment with
modifying it. Many of these students carried this knowledge with them into
the professional world and contributed to the expanding popularity of
UNIX.

The University of California at Berkeley was a big player in the

development of UNIX in the late ’70s and through the mid ’80s. The
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) variant of UNIX contributed many
new features including an improved file system, virtual memory
management, a complete TCP/IP implementation and a variety of
networking tools.

With the breakup of their monopoly in the early ’80s, AT&T was free to
market their version of UNIX to commercial vendors. They employed
developers to enhance UNIX and also incorporated some of the BSD
features. AT&T released System V of Unix in 1989 and it formed the basis
for many commercial implementations of UNIX such as Solaris for Sun
workstations and Ultrix for Digital computers.
Standardization
With some UNIX implementations based on BSD and others based on
System V and the variability of added features provided by computer
vendors, UNIX needed standards so that applications could be shared
across platforms. The first step in standardizing UNIX began with the
movement towards standardizing the C language in 1989. The
standardization guaranteed that a C program that just used the C libraries
could run on any computer, using any operating system.

There are two UNIX standards, “Single UNIX Specification (SUS)” and
“POSIX”. Those that pass conformance tests for the SUS are granted the
right to be branded “UNIX” by the holders of the UNIX trademark. The
POSIX standard was developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE). Apple’s macOS follows the POSIX standard.
Linux
Linux is an open-source version of the UNIX operating system. Open
source means it is developed by a community and anyone can view or
modify the source code. The open source nature of this operating system
has led to many different versions of it. These versions are called
distributions, often abbreviated as distro. There are different distributions
of Linux tailored for different hardware systems from the Raspberry Pi to
versions that run on supercomputers. Linux is considered mostly POSIX
compliant but is not POSIX certified.

There are dozens of Linux distributions, but some of the more popular ones
you will hear are Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Different
distributions may differ in which applications are included, whether they
are completely open source, and how often a stable version is released.

The distribution of Linux you will access through the terminal in this
course is Ubuntu 18.04.6 (which is based on the Debian distribution of
Linux). You can see this version at the very top of the message of the day
(the message printed when you start the terminal):

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-1058-aws x86_64)

* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage

For the rest of this course, we will automatically clear the message of the
day so you have more screen space.

Try it out for yourself by typing clear into the terminal on

the left and pressing Enter.

Linux Kernel, Tools and Libraries

The portion of the operating system that handles the

computer resources (CPU, RAM and devices) is referred to as
the kernel. The initial version of the Linux kernel, created by
Linus Torvalds, was written specifically for the Intel 80386
chip, a standard chip used in personal computers in the late
1980’s and 1990’s. The kernel has been ported to many
different chip architectures since then.
 Tux, the
There is also a set of standard software utilities that Linux
accompany the system that provide services such as a mascot
command line interpreters, file utilities and editors that we
will cover in this module. Many of the Linux tools are written
in C and are therefore machine independent.

When people refer to the Linux operating system they mean the kernel as
well as the accompanying set of tools and libraries that is actually called
GNU. Some people refer to this combination as GNU/Linux (as you see in
the message of the day) but we will just refer to the kernel plus the utilities
as Linux. For the most part the utilities that are packaged with Linux are
functionally equivalent to the utilities with the same name in UNIX, but
they have been rewritten.
The Command Line Interface
The Command Line Interface, better known as CLI, or Shell is one way to
interact with your computer. The command line interface which you see in
the terminal window on the left is called Bash. It is the default login shell
for most Linux distributions. It is considered very portable and is widely
used on many UNIX implementations as well as on other operating
systems.

Command Line Prompt

In the terminal window on the left you will see the command line prompt.
It looks something like what you see below:

codio@matrixrudolf-trustgame:~/workspace$

Take a look at the different pieces of the command prompt:

- The first part of the command prompt is the username followed by the @
symbol. On the Ubuntu server you see in the terminal, Codio has
automatically created a user called codio.
- The server address after the @ sign is specified using a unique
combination of words. Codio runs each assignment/lesson as a distinct
Ubuntu so you will notice that the server address changes throughout this
course.
- The information after the colon is an abbreviation of the current
working directory.
- The command line prompt ends with a $

Command prompt colored to highlight features as described in

list above
 info

Folders vs. directories

The terms folders and directories are sometimes used
interchangeably.
In general the term folders is used in conjunction with graphical user
interfaces and the term directories is more common with a CLI.

Home and Working Directories

The ~ symbol, better known as the tilde symbol represents the home
directory. This is why the ~ directory is /home/codio.

Remember that Unix, and therefore Linux, is a multi-user operating

system, meaning each user can access and share system resources such as
memory. To keep things organized, each user has their own home directory.
If you were on a server with multiple users, each one would have their
own home directory as in:

/home/username1
/home/username2

Another important directory is the working directory. The working

directory is basically where you are (the directory you are currently
working in).

While you can see the relative working directory after the : in the
command line prompt, sometimes it’s helpful to print the working
directory.

Type pwd (which stands for print working directory) in the

terminal window to the left.

pwd

The shell will print the working directory directly below the command:

Print working directory

Printing the contents of a file and
viewing the manual
catis the shell command - it is short for “catalog” and it prints out the
contents of a file.

In the terminal window on the left type:

cat /etc/os-release

/etc/os-release is the file we are printing out. In a directory called etc

there is information about the release we are using, in a file called os-
release.

You should see something like this:

NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="18.04.6 LTS (Bionic Beaver)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS"
VERSION_ID="18.04"
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-
policies/privacy-policy"
VERSION_CODENAME=bionic
UBUNTU_CODENAME=bionic
The general syntax for cat is:

Viewing the manual

You can find more information about many bash commands by typing man
followed by the command name, man is short for manual.

Try it now by typing man cat in the terminal window on the

left.

To exit the manual, type the letter q.

Type man bash in the terminal window on the left and use
the information provided to answer the question below.

Scroll the manual page by using the up and down arrow keys or the
scroll wheel on your mouse
To exit the manual, type the letter q.
Listing Directory Contents

Try the following versions of the ls command, one at a time.

Compare what you see in the output with what is visible in
the file tree panel on the far left.

ls
ls -l
ls -a
ls -m
ls -R

What do the characters at the beginning of the lines mean?

When you get a full listing of the directory contents you see each line start
with something like -rwxr-xr-x. This is a topic we will cover extensively in
the Processes, Services and Privileges but in short, these are the
privileges for the file. The r stands for read, the w stands for write, and the
x stands for execute. The three sets are associated with the owner, the
group and everyone. Where you see a d as the first letter, that means it is a
directory.

Did you notice how the argument to the ls command changed the output?
| Command option | Output |
|———|———-|
| (none) | A regular sorted list of files in the directory |
| -l | A more complete list with permissions |
| -a | Hidden files were included |
| -m | A comma-separated list |
| -R | Included directories and their contents |

The -R argument stands for recursive. This is a very important argument

when you are dealing with directories because you can have many nested
directories and you may want your commands to apply to them all.

A closer look at the ls -a option

Type in ls -a again, you should see something similar to the

image below.
 directory listing using -a

Can you guess which are files and which are directories?

The directories are the items listed in blue.

As you can see, bash sorts files and directories alphabetically starting with
the dots.

info

Single and double dots

Dots in bash are useful utilities that help with navigating the file
system using the CLI.

In an ls -a listing…

. refers to the current directory.

.. refers to the parent directory.

There are a lot of arguments you can pass to ls, to see them all type man ls.
Navigating the File System
We learned about the home directory when we discussed the command
line prompt, there is another important directory to mention, the root
directory.

Type in the command we learned earlier:

pwd

You will see the following:

/home/codio/workspace

The leading / means root.

Type the following command at the prompt:

ls /

This command shows you all the directories and files that are in the root
directory.
 info

## Terminal Tips
1. Cycle through all the commands you have entered using the up and
down arrow keys
2. Position your cursor at the beginning and end of the command
prompt by using ctrl-a and ctrl-e
3. Use the tab key to complete directory and filenames

### Try these variations

Use the tips above to reduce typing.
- ls /home
- ls /home/codio
- ls /home/codio/workspace

The last one is equivalent to just typing ls since /home/codio/workspace

is the folder you are in.

Changing Directories
The command to change directories is cd as in “change directory”. To try it
out we’ll switch to the directory test.
### Type the following command at the prompt:

cd test

Now you can type in ls to see what is in that directory and then cat
followed by the name of the file that is in there. You have now explored the
test directory!
 challenge

What happens if you type in the change

directory command again?

cd test

Why is this an error?

You get an error: bash: cd: test: No such file or directory.

We are already in the test directory and there is no test directory inside
it.

A relative path is related to the current working directory. When we typed

in cd test that was a relative path. We were switching to a directory that
was inside of our current directory so we didn’t have to list out the entire
path starting at the root.

An absolute path is represented as starting from the root directory by

leading with the /. The absolute path equivalent of the cd test we did
earlier would be cd /home/codio/workspace/test

To back out of the test directory, you could use absolute file paths (cd
/home/codio/workspace) or you can use the relative path. Earlier we
discussed the single and double dot files you see when you type the
command ls -a. The double dot file is very useful.

Go up one directory by typing:

cd ..

You should find yourself back in /home/codio/workspace (which you can

verify with pwd).