Before you can do anything, you need to make friends with the machine. The slogan to remember here is `unix is user-friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are'. Keep calm, breath deeply, and make friends with a guru.
Your first source of information might be SUN/145, Starlink's Unix introduction. This covers the basics of logging on, moving around, issuing commands, creating files, and starting programming. It also includes references to other Starlink documents which can provide more detailed help on various aspects.
There are very good online introductions to Unix at
<http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/>
and
<http://star-www.maps.susx.ac.uk/help/4ltrwrd/unixman.html>
There are numerous books on Unix. Two which seem to be at
the right level are Unix Shells by Example
[quigley] and Unix in a
Nutshell [nutshell]. Both cover
the Bourne shell (sh
) and the C shell
(csh
), plus other utilities such as
sed
and awk
(see Section 2.4.6.1). By the way, let me put in a plug for
bash
as a usable shell, as it includes all the
best bits of the Bourne and C shells. The only disadvantage
of bash is that Starlink has, to some extent, standardised
on csh
, so that setup scripts, for example, are
designed to work with csh
alone; this is not
often a real problem, since these scripts are generally
simple enough that you can duplicate their effects `by
hand'.
You will occasionally see references to unix manual pages
followed by a number. This indicates which section of the
manual the documentation can be found in (section 1 is
normal user commands, section 3 is standard library calls,
section 5 is file formats, and so on). If you see a
reference to sed(1)
, for example, you'd read
the manual page online with the command man
sed
. A useful variant of the man
command is apropos
, for example apropos
find
. This searches the list of man-pages, and lists
all those commands which include a particular word in their
short description.