Mac OS X UNIX Tutorial for Beginners

Typographical Conventions

Introduction to The UNIX operating system

Tutorial One

• Listing files and directories
• Making Directories
• Changing to a different Directory
• The directories . and ..
• Pathnames
• More about home directories and pathnames

Tutorial Two

• Copying Files
• Moving Files
• Removing Files and directories
• Displaying the contents of a file on the screen
• Searching the contents of a file

Tutorial Three

• Redirection
• Redirecting the Output
• Redirecting the Input
• Pipes

Tutorial Four

• Wildcards
• Filename Conventions
• Getting Help

Tutorial Five

• File system security (access rights)
• Changing access rights
• Processes and Jobs
• Listing suspended and background processes
• Killing a process

Tutorial Six

• Other Useful UNIX commands

Tutorial Seven

• Compiling UNIX software packages
• Download source code
• Extracting source code
• Configuring and creating the Makefile
• Building the package
• Running the software
• Stripping unnecessary code

Tutorial Eight

• UNIX shells
• Environment variables
• Setting the PATH
• The .profile file

UNIX command summary

UNIX Help for Users

• For more help with UNIX, try this guide from the University of Edinburgh

UNIX Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• These seven articles contain the answers to some Frequently Asked Questions often seen in comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell.

Adapted for Mac OS X by Shane Burns from a tutorial by M.Stonebank@surrey.ac.uk

This tutorial is licensed under a Creative Commons License.