Basics Linux Tutorial
To be honest, its very simple your terminal is your main thing in linux, its how you get to directory’s, install programs from the inter webs.
A simple description of the UNIX system, also applicable to Linux, is this:
“On a UNIX system, everything is a file; if something is not a file, it is a process.”
This statement is true because there are special files that are more than just files (named pipes and sockets, for instance), but to keep things simple, saying that everything is a file is an acceptable generalization. A Linux system, just like UNIX, makes no difference between a file and a directory, since a directory is just a file containing names of other files. Programs, services, texts, images, and so forth, are all files. Input and output devices, and generally all devices, are considered to be files, according to the system.
In order to manage all those files in an orderly fashion, man likes to think of them in an ordered tree-like structure on the hard disk, as we know from MS-DOS (Disk Operating System) for instance. The large branches contain more branches, and the branches at the end contain the tree’s leaves or normal files. For now we will use this image of the tree, but we will find out later why this is not a fully accurate image.
3.1.1.2. Sorts of files
Most files are just files, called regular files; they contain normal data, for example text files, executable files or programs, input for or output from a program and so on.
While it is reasonably safe to suppose that everything you encounter on a Linux system is a file, there are some exceptions.
- Directories: files that are lists of other files.
- Special files: the mechanism used for input and output. Most special files are in /dev, we will discuss them later.
- Links: a system to make a file or directory visible in multiple parts of the system’s file tree. We will talk about links in detail.
- (Domain) sockets: a special file type, similar to TCP/IP sockets, providing inter-process networking protected by the file system’s access control.
- Named pipes: act more or less like sockets and form a way for processes to communicate with each other, without using network socket semantics.
The -l option to ls displays the file type, using the first character of each input line:
root@YourUser:~# ls -l |
This table gives an overview of the characters determining the file type:
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The Advanced Package Tool is a management system for software packages. The command line tool for handling packages is apt-get, which comes with an excellent man page describing how to install and update packages and how to upgrade singular packages or your entire distribution. APT has its roots in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, where it is the default manager for the Debian packages. APT has been ported to work with RPM packages as well. The main advantage of APT is that it is free and flexible to use. It will allow you to set up systems similar to the distribution specific (and in some cases commercial) ones listed in the next sections.
Generally, when first using apt-get, you will need to get an index of the available packages. This is done using the command
apt-get update
After that, you can use apt-get to upgrade your system:
apt-get upgrade
Do this often, it’s an easy way to keep your system up-to-date and thus safe.
Apart from this general usage, apt-get is also very fast for installing individual packages. This is how it works:
root@YourUser:~# apt-get |
Note the -c option to the su command, which indicates to the root shell to only execute this command, and then return to the user’s environment. This way, you cannot forget to quit the root account.
If there are any dependencies on other packages, apt-get will download and install these supporting packages.
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