Linux Essentials

Audience

This course is designed for technical staff (support personnel, application developers, system integrators) and users requiring the basic skills necessary to interface effectively with UNIX and Linux based Open Systems.

This course is suitable for all major vendor releases of UNIX and Linux, including AIX (up to 7.x), HP-UX, Sun Solaris, SCO UNIXWare, Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, etc...

Prerequisites

Delegates should be technical staff who have some knowledge of the Windows operating system at any level.

No prior experience with UNIX or Linux is required.

Course Objectives

This course provides technical staff new to UNIX and Linux with a sound appreciation of the operating system.  Delegates will leave this class with a fundamental knowledge of the UNIX and Linux operating systems and be able to use some of the more advanced facilities.

Having gained suitable, complementary experience they can progress to further specialised training to establish peak effectiveness.

On completion of this course delegates will be able to:

• Describe the various interfaces to UNIX and Linux

• Benefit from the GUI desktop environments

• Work with the command line and use basic UNIX & Linux commands

• Navigate the filesystem and manipulate files and directories

• Maintain file security

• Manage processes

• Benefit from the functionality of the Korn and BASH shell

• Edit text with vi and vim

• Access the web and utilise mail services

• Create Simple Shell Scripts

Course Content

Welcome to the world of UNIX and Linux

• Why do Users choose UNIX and Linux?

• An Operating System

• The UNIX and Linux Operating Systems

• Components of the Operating System

• Organisation of a UNIX and Linux System

• The Kernel

• The Filesystem

• The Shell

• User Interfaces

• Terminal-based Interface

• The Command Processor. 

• Utilities

• Window-based Interfaces (CDE, KDE and Gnome)

• Using Gnome

• Distributed Environments

• Networking

Logging On and Getting Help

• Logging On

• Accessing the Command Line

• Format of UNIX and Linux Commands

• Getting help

• Web based help

• Super User Privileges and Setting and Changing the Password

Navigating the Filesystem

• Structure of a UNIX and Linux Filesystem

• Identifying Files and Directories

• Address Formats

• The Home Directory

• Where am I? (pwd)

• Moving Around the Filesystem (cd)

• Listing Directory Contents

• Creating Directories

• Removing Directories

• Displaying Files

• Displaying File Contents

• Copying Files and Directories

• Moving and Renaming Files & Directories

• Removing Files

Shell Facilities

• The Shell Environment

• Using Wildcards (Metacharacters)

• Default Action of the Shell

• Saving Output and Using File Input (Redirection)

• Bolting Commands Together (piping)

• Gluing Files Together (cat)

• Aliases

Package Management

• Source vs Binary

• Distributions

• Redhat Package Manager (RPM)

• YUM

• Debian Packages (dpkg)

• APT

• Package Management GUIs

Editing

• Introducing the vi and vim Editors

• Key Tricks

• vi and vim Modes

• The vi and vim Editor for Beginners

• Some Further Useful features

Process Handling

• What is a Process?

• Interactive or Background?

• Process Fork / exec

• Process, Report Status

• Process, kill a

• Allocating Priority

• Logging out using Nohup

• Sequential Command

Networking

• Network basics

• ifconfig 

• ip command

• boot time network configuration

Physical Storage

• Disk Structure

• Partitions

• RAID

• LVM

File Systems

• Elements of a file System

• Types of File System

• Journalling

• Creating a file System

• Expanding a file system

UNIX and Linux Utilities

• The Find Utility

• Sort or merge Files

• sed, grep, regular expressions  and wildcards

UNIX and Linux Security

• File System Permissions

• Change mode

• Symbolic Notation

• Octal Notation

• Change owner

• Change group

• Default Creation Mode

• Backup and Restore

• Tar, Zip and Unzip Utilities

• Cpio Utility

• Pathname considerations

The Shell Environment

• Shell Environment

• System Variables

• Shell Variables

• Assigning Variables

• Displaying Variable Values

• Exporting variables

• Shell Interpretation

• Using Quotes in the Shell

• The Back Quote (Command Quote)

• The Single Quote

• The Double Quotes

• The Backslash

• Special Escape Characters

• Recalling and Modifying Previous Commands

Shell Programming

• Shell Scripts

• Executing Shell Scripts

• Passing Arguments To A Program

• Positional Parameters

• Special Shell Parameters

• The Read Command