Background

Read Chapters 4-7 of TLCL. Practice the commands at least once, but don’t worry about memorizing them, you will naturally memorize the as you use them more often.

• In chapter 5 the which, man and alias commands are the ones I find most useful. I rarely if ever use the others. You’re experience may be different, of course, but feel free to skip over the others for now.
• Chapter 6 is very important. The concept of redirection and pipes is central to the Unix command line and is what provides much of the power and flexibility of working from the command line. Spend some time getting familiar with the syntax as it repurposes some symboles that have a different meaning in most other programming contexts.
• If you spend more than an hour on this before getting through Chapter 7 stop and let me know on Monday.

Self Study

1. What is the relationship between the ln command and “shortcuts” on Windows?
2. Why is the default behavior of the cp, mv and rm command to potentially overwrite or remove existing files without prompting?
3. Why are standard output and standard error two separate output streams? i.e. Why not just write regular output and diagnostic messages to the same output stream?
4. How does the concept of ‘every program is a filter’ fit in with the concept of Unix pipelines?
5. How does the shell’s ability to perform input/output redirection simplify your job as a developer when writing programs?