Preface

This document was originally written as an introduction to Unix, Berkeley Edition (4.* BSD), as used on Black (DECstation) and the Sun workstations at Clark. (Sun's operating system, Solaris, includes System V and other extensions as well.) Since Unix has very good online documentation, this document does not try to be comprehensive. Instead, the goal is to give you enough general information that you can use the other documentation intelligently. I am currently revising it for our Linux workstations in the lab. Linux is another implementation of Unix, following the POSIX standard. Our primary audience is students attempting to develop programs. But even if you are not going to write a program, you will find most of this document useful. If you are not interested in programming, you should skip section 8 (Compiling and Running Your Program). This document describes Unix for people who are using conventional terminals. Those of you using Sun workstations have additional graphical and window-oriented facilities available. These are described in separate documentation for the Sun. However, you'll still spend most of your time using the commands described here. So we recommend that you start with this manual, get used to Unix in its simple form, and then start playing with windows and other fancy features. If you are going to make serious use of Unix, you will probably want to read documentation on the shell carefully. Since the shell is what reads and executes your commands, you will spend a lot of time talking to it. You also need to use a text editor to write programs or any document. A popular editor on Unix is EMACS (or XEMACS, emacs with the X-window support), which is also a powerful interface to the whole Unix system. It is a good idea to go through the EMACS tutorial in EMACS. First type the command ``emacs" followed by ``return'' key, and then type ``Ctrl-h t'' within EMACS. (see section 3 below for the meaning of the key strokes). At the end of the document we recommend some good books on Unix.