Using Unix Tutorial website

Who should use Unix Tutorial

This website was created with Unix beginners in mind, and this means that majority of the topics are basic-to-intermediate difficulty level.

If you’re an advanced Unix user or systems administrator, I can’t promise to entertain you much – that being said, you’re free to contact me with your questions and suggestions as I don’t want to limit the material to basics only.

Unix Tutorial navigation

Currently, the website has the following sections for you to explore:

Unix Tutorial blog – all the new material gets posted there, feel free to subscribe to Unix Tutorial feed to follow it

Unix Tutorial archives – a full list of all the articles on this website so far, great for finding out which topics were covered when.

Unix Tutorial Facebook page – I publish updated and cross-post Unix Tutorial blog updates on this Facebook page, so follow it if you’re consuming your contect using Facebook.

Unix Tutorial Facebook group – a brand new section of the website for visitors to interact. This is a great place for you to ask new questions and get answers.

Unix Commands – a section of this website, Unix Commands accompanies Unix Tutorial blog by being a repository of Unix commands descriptions. Every command has a set of examples for your convenience.

Unix Reference – a structured index of most useful articles on Unix Tutorial. This page has sections of various Unix administration aspects and also explains the same challenges in plain English. Use this page to quickly find the full coverage of a certain topic on Unix Tutorial

Unix commands and script examples

All the examples shown on Unix Tutorial pages are copy-and-paste friendly – this means that you can simply copy a one-liner, paste it into your Unix shell session and get a result.

Warning: only one-line examples can be safely reused in Unix command line. Shell script examples need to be copied and saved as a plain text file before they can be used. You should not attempt to copy-and-paste a shell script example into your command line to avoid confusion.

For more script examples, it is assumed that once you create a plain text file and paste the text of a script, you’ll then change the permissions on this file to make it executable.

If you saved a script as /tmp/exampe.sh file, this is the command to make it executable:

ubuntu$ chmod a+x /tmp/example.sh

OS flavors and release versions

Since topics are not limited to a particular flavor or release of Unix-like OS, anything release-specific is usually accompanied with explanations.

Generally, the flavor of an OS used for each example is shown in the command line prompt.

This is, for example, Ubuntu:

ubuntu$ echo "Hello, world!"
Hello, world!

And that’s how CentOS command will be presented:

centos$ echo "Hello, world!"
Hello, world!

I also have examples from MacOS.

If different hardware architectures are used in a particular post, it will most certainly be highlighted as well.