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2.1 Unix guides

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.


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Theory and Modelling Resources Cookbook
Starlink Cookbook 13
Norman Gray
2 December 2001. Release 2-5. Last updated 10 March 2003