Essentials

Start up a VNC connection to your Windows 7 virtual machine, then using the Start menu navigate to All Programs / Cygwin / Cygwin Bash Shell. You should now have the bash Cygwin prompt.

The "cd" command changes your current directory. On its own it changes it to your HOME directory, otherwise you need to specify a parameter which either is an absolute directory (such as cd /home) or a relative directory (such as cd dir1 which takes you to dir1 in your current working directory).

Type

cd
pwd

What is your current working directory? :

Make three directories in your HOME directory. Name these directories "mydir", "data", and "images".

Change your working directory into "data". Create two more directories in /home/caine/data called "dir1" and "dir2". If you create them in the wrong place delete them using "rmdir".

Change directory into dir2.

What is your current working directory? :

Change your current working directory to HOME. You can either "cd" (takes you home) or "cd .." as needed, as ".." means the directory above the current directory in your directory tree. Check with pwd to make sure you are in the right directory. Then try to delete the data directory using "rmdir data". What message to you get back?

Use the more powerful and dangerous command

rm -rf data

The "ls" command on its own shows you the contents of the current working directory. However it can also take a number of useful parameters.

Filenames which begin with a "." character do not usually appear when you use "ls". These are called "hidden" files, and they are used for things like application configuration and some GUI state information. They are rarely needed so this is the reason they are hidden from normal "ls".

Use the option "-a" to see the hidden files. View the hidden files in your HOME directory. The file list starts with "." (which is a directory that you can use to describe the current directory in commands) and ".." (which describes the directory above this one in the tree).

What is the first file (in alphabetical order) which appears when you use "-a" in your HOME directory, other than "." and "..". :

Use the "-l" option to see a long listing of the .bash_profile file. Identify its size in bytes. This size appears before the creation date. :

The following command, echo, simply prints to the screen its parameters.

echo "line 1: test" 

echo "line 1: test" > outfile1

Copy the outfile1 file to outfile2, and then append to that file the current date and time.

date >> outfile2

Copy the file outfile1 to yearfile2. Copy the file outfile1 to yearfile3.

Change the name of file yearfile3 to thisyear.

Delete the file outfile1.

Concatinate the files "outfile2", "thisyear" together to form a single big file called "bigfile". Check that your command worked using cat.