Shell 101

To follow along with the examples shown here using the virtual machines is it safer to use an account other than the administration account (root). By pressing the button below a new account is created called "demo", password is also "demo". Log in using this account and you cannot do any damage. If you mess the account up and want to start again, just press the button again.

Once created, you can log into this account using telnet or ssh, logging into the hostname linuxzoo.net. Remember the username is demo and the password is demo. And remember, you cannot break anything using this account! The account begins with an empty directory, so dont be shocked that "ls" shows nothing...

MAKE SURE YOU USE THE USER demo. If you do this with "root" or another account, you will be marked wrong. If you start with the wrong user, make sure you delete any files you created wrongly before changing to demo.

Use the cal command to find out which day the 31th of December 2002 was on. cal takes two parameters, the number of the month (e.g. 1 for January, 8 for August) and the year as a 4 digit number (e.g. 1997).

Enter the name of the day in the box below. For Monday enter "Mo", Tuesday is "Tu", Wednesday is "We", etc.

Enter the day:

cal can also work with 1 parameter, which is the year. When given a year, it displays a calander for the whole year. Use this feature but redirect the output of cal so that the calander for 2005 is saved to a file called "yearfile" in the home directory of demo.

Use the ls command to see the hidden and normal files you have in the home directory for "demo". Count all the files and directories shown and enter the number below. Include in the counting "." and "..".

Number of files:

Which file in /home/demo (including hidden files) has the smallest size? Enter the size below:

Smallest size:

Use redirection to create a file called "thismonth", containing only this month's current calendar. Then use the date command to append the current date to the end of the same file.

Copy the file yearfile to yearfile2. Copy the file yearfile to yearfile3.

Change the name of file yearfile3 to thisyear.

Delete the file yearfile.

Concatinate the files "thismonth", "yearfile2" and "thisyear" together to form a single big file called "bigfile". Check that your command worked using more.