Shell Basics

You will enter the Unix shell after you login remotely (for example, through Tera Term Pro, Nifty Telnet, or from another Unix host with ssh) or open a terminal window from within the X-Windows environment. The Unix shell allows you to execute quite a plethora of commands to manipulate files or perform other tasks (such as sending a file to the printer). Commands are issued from your prompt, which looks like this (note that the username is ``joeblow'' and the host machine you are logged into is ``laser''):

joeblow@laser%

Almost all commands can be given options to enable different functions. An option is usually one letter preceded by a dash. As an example, the command ls will simply provide a list of filenames in the current directory. By adding the -l option, the command ls -l will list the files with all their properties (size, date last modified, etc.)