Introduction to the Unix Shell

Description

This four class course is designed to introduce attendees to fundamental Unix commands and shell scripting. Each class includes brief tutorials interspersed with challenge exercises, and assumes no prior computing experience. At the end of this course, you will be able to use Unix commands to work with and navigate files and directories, combine commands using pipes, create basic shell scripts, and search files and their contents.

A solid understanding of these basic principles is required to succeed in our intermediate high performance computing (HPC) courses for both the on-premise clusters and cloud computing. Additionally, general Unix skills are a pre-requisite for other intermediate courses, like RNAseq analysis. Basic pre-requisites for such courses are described in the Unix Crash Course.

This repository is adapted from content originally appearing in The Unix Shell, Copyright (c) Software Carpentry, as well as the Unix chapters of Research Software Engineering with Python.

Software requirements to participate in this course can be found on fredhutch.io’s Software page.

Schedule

• Class 1: Introduction to shell commands
• Class 2: Repeating commands
• Class 3: Leveling up your Unix skills

Resources

• Materials for each class are described in the file prefaced with the number of the class. Additional challenge exercises are included at the end of each class file.
• solutions/ includes the solutions for all challenges
• instructors.md includes information for instructors to facilitate teaching each lesson
• hackmdio.txt is an archive of the interactive webpage used during lessons