We have some UsingUnix pages for students new to unix. If this is your first CS course at Swarthmore, those pages are meant to help you understand our setup.
Here’s a table of some basic Unix commands:
Command | Examples | Description |
---|---|---|
ls |
ls |
list files and directories |
ls |
ls -al |
list all files, long output format |
pwd |
pwd |
print working directory (where you are) |
cd |
cd directory |
change directory |
cp |
cp file newname |
copy a file to a new name |
mv |
mv file newname |
move/rename a file |
mv |
mv file directory |
move file to a directory |
less |
less filename |
view file one page at a time (q to quit) |
mkdir |
mkdir newdir |
make a new directory |
And here’s an example of using some of the above commands, with typical outputs (username is csmajor1). Note the dollar sign is the unix shell prompt (your prompt may look a little different), and anything after the dollar sign is what the user is typing.
$ ls
Desktop/ Documents/ cs21/
$ pwd
/home/csmajor1
$ cd cs21/labs/00
$ pwd
/home/csmajor1/cs21/labs/00
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw------- 1 csmajor1 users 303 Jan 23 12:22 QUESTIONS-00.txt
-rw------- 1 csmajor1 users 513 Jan 23 12:22 bio.txt
-rw------- 1 csmajor1 users 1766 Jan 23 12:22 fixme-gb.txt
$ cp bio.txt newbio.txt
$ ls
QUESTIONS-00.txt bio.txt fixme-gb.txt newbio.txt
$ mv newbio.txt mybio.txt
$ ls
QUESTIONS-00.txt bio.txt fixme-gb.txt mybio.txt
$ rm mybio.txt
rm: remove regular file 'mybio.txt'? y
$ ls
QUESTIONS-00.txt bio.txt fixme-gb.txt
In the above example the user:
ls
pwd
cd
to their cs21/labs/00 folderls -l
)