This information is targeted primarily at CS 241, 230, 234, and other students, who are frequently encountering Unix for the first time. If you have already used Unix for a UW CS course, most of this information should be redundant. Learning Unix is an ongoing process, however, so many students may find this information useful even after completing several Unix courses.
Introduction to X and Unix Tutorial - Web (HTML), PostScript, PDF
All CS students should go through this entire tutorial within the first week or two of beginning their first Unix course.
Why?
Learning Unix can be quite intimidating. Before it is possible to do anything, there are a large number of details that must be mastered. The above tutorial, provided by MFCF, is intended to cover the absolute essentials in as painless a way as possible. For those students that have already used Unix, the tutorial will be very easy and quick. For those with less or no experience, it will be harder and take longer. But in the long run we guarantee that you will save time. We're not talking a few minutes either; probably whole days of frustration will be reduced by being familiar with the contents of this tutorial.
We suggest in particular the intro page (ignoring the information at the bottom that is specific to that university) and the first four tutorials. Please note that this tutorial does not give sufficient warning that the command rm and rmdir are not reversible; they simply delete files and folders instead of moving them to the Trash or Recycle Bin, so be careful!
A convenient reference sheet briefly describing a number of very useful Unix commands. Further details can be retrieved from the man pages.
These labs cover some additional topics (with a little overlap) that may be helpful.
The following is a bit of additional documentation for commands that frequently cause problems for students.
Do not use Pico (or nano) to do your CS assignments! Many people find Pico to be quite useful for small jobs like creating a .forward file or similar, but it is quite inappropriate for large CS projects.
Here are some links to pages with information about Emacs, a popular editor which is recommended for CS assignments.
Here are some links to pages with information about VI and Vim, other popular editors which many people find quite useful.
No serious computer scientist looks down upon anybody else for using a different editor from their own personal favourite.
These are links to various pages, some from other institutions, that may be helpful in helping to learn more advanced Unix tools.