Essential Unix commands

Enter the number of entries in the top level directory. You can use the command ls / and simply count the words.

If you are too lazy to count you can pass the output through the wc command: ls /|wc

Enter a number:

Edit the file /etc/motd so that it contains the single word Welcome You can use the echo command and redirect the output, or you can use an editor such as vi or nano (similar to pico). If you get a permission denied error ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE ROOT?

On some Windows machines, nano does not seem to like the cursor keys. If (and only if) the cursor keys result in funny characters when using nano, type the following at the prompt and then try nano again:

export TERM=vt102

Give the uid of the user called "operator".

Enter a number:

Who is the owner of the directory /var/cache/httpd? If you get no information, are you sure you are using "ls" to give the directory information or the contents of the directory instead?

Enter the user name:

Give the name of the first directory (alphabetically) of / that has no read permission for other.

Enter the directory name:

Change the permission of the directory /var/log/httpd so that group and world have execute and read permission.

Change the owner of the file /etc/ntp.conf to operator

Create a directory /root/dropzone It should be set up so that group and other users can save files in the directory, but they cannot read the files that are there. User root must able to read and write the directory.

Create a symbolic link so that the file /usr/share/dict/words appears as /root/words

This is a challenge question. Miss it out if you dont know regular expressions.

Use grep on words to find a word that contains each of the vowels in the correct order. How many such words are there? (you may include words with extra vowels such as adventitious. /root/words

This is a challenge question. Miss it out if you dont know regular expressions.

The word minglingly includes the same four characters (e.g. ingl) repeated. How many such words are there which also begin with lower case "m" (any four character are repeated).

Look in /usr/share/doc and find a directory starting "git-" followed by a version number. In the following questions this directory is referred to as the "git" directory...

How much space is being used by the git directory? Use a command to calculate this, and dont try adding it up yourself! We want the total answer in human readable format (eg 6.2M).

In human readable form (eg 123M) how much disk space is available on the main filesystem?

Remove the entire git directory (it is not used in our tutorials). Now repeat the above calculation for disk space, but this time give the answer in blocks.