Meeting Minutes for Wednesday, Nov 30, 2005

So, here's what went down this meeting, and you can also find the current
and previous minutes at http://morlug.org/meetings/minutes/.

##

Morlug - Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - Command Line Kung Foo!

Topics::

Bourne Shell
GNU Runtime Libraries
History
Textual Completion (TAB)
Processing Handling


Description::

An attempt to touch on the basics of command in Linux.

Meeting Content::

Jonathon has the floor.  Linux needs a human interaction via commandline.
A shell surrounds the kernel, the outer most layer.  Std input/output
through  the keyboard.From the Bourne Shell (sh) Bourne again shell was born
by Richard Stallman.
Its easy to start most gui's from the command line.  Emacs is a great editor
based on the GNU project.  Now let's practice...

For Emacs:
ctrl-k (kill) deletes a whole line.
ctrl-y (yank) restores the line.
Basically its cut/paste with funny names, best described in the
documentation for emacs.
alt-b moves you backwards through the line.
alt-f moves you forward through the line.
alt-backspace delete the last previous word.

On some terminals alt may not work.

For History:
pressing the up arrow will bring up your most recent command.
now everyone type "echo $HISTFILE"
...~/.bash_history

For Textual Completion:
pressing TAB will list all items that can be completed from the letters
typed in the command line.
...$ <TAB> shows all shell environment variables
...~ <TAB> shows all items related to current user

More Bash Commands:
cd . takes you to your current directory
cd .. takes you to the parent directory

typing help will display all built-in commands into the shell.

typing pwd will display your current directory.

typing echo $PATH will display all bin directories.
.../usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin

type echo * to display all contents of directory
...a mimicked command would be ls
the * is a wildcard to display all items
ex: echo g* would display all items that begin with "g".

Searching on a range of letters.

typing cd $HOME will bring you back to your home directory which is the same
as cd ~

Processs Handling:

User multi-tasking.

ex: type emacs& to send the the process to the background

type fg to see background processes
type bg to bring it back to the background

type jobs to list processes, then kill %[job #]

type jobs -p to list process id.

type ctrl-c to kill process

type ctrl-\ to kill ultimately

type killall [process name] -kills all child process below it.

Unix I/O:
file I/O sequence of characters
...ex: drives are treated as files.

cat copies input to output
grep searches input to output

the pipe character can be useful to move data outputted to a program to use.
ex: ls -la | less will output the contents of the directory to less

tee is used to pipe std output to a file.

label redirection is used to redirect std output to a file
ex: cat >>file<<.
    >type here
    >foobar
    ctrl-d


p.s. Jonathon will be posting his meeting notes on the command line, so
check it out for a more in depth look.

--
Perriero, Derek
[email protected]

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