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Working in the Bash shell

An introduction

Robert Brunner (rb@ncsa.uiuc.edu), NCSA Research Scientist, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Robert J. Brunner is a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has published several books and a number of articles and tutorials on a range of topics. You can reach him at rb@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

Summary: Get an introduction to the Bash shell, which you can use on nearly any UNIX®-based operating system. Bash is a mature, powerful, yet easy-to-use shell that is freely available. This tutorial provides a brief history of Bash, which indicates how the Bash shell is different than some of the other popular UNIX shells, and also provides an overview of the major features available within Bash. Next, you'll learn more about the UNIX file system, how to work with both directories and files, and several methods for customizing the appearance and behavior of Bash. Finally, the tutorial concludes with a discussion of the job control functionality of Bash.

Date: 30 May 2006
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (70 KB | 18 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 34802 views
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Before you start

Learn what to expect from this tutorial and how to get the most out of it.

About this tutorial

This tutorial provides a basic overview of Bash. After reading this tutorial, you should be able to perform basic operations within a UNIX® terminal that is running Bash. This includes moving around the file system, working with files and directories, and running basic commands.

Objectives

This tutorial is written for anyone who wants to learn how to use Bash to interact with their computer directly from the command line. If you have a computer running Linux®, Mac OS® X, or another UNIX system and want to learn how to get started working in Bash, this tutorial is for you.

Prerequisites

This tutorial has no prerequisites.

System requirements

There are no system requirements for this tutorial -- you can simply read along and learn about Bash. To maximize your benefits from this tutorial, however, you need to be able to try the techniques the tutorial presents. This requires an operational Bash shell, preferably version 2.05, or higher. If you do not have a current version of Bash installed on your computer, visit the Bash home page for information about how to obtain your own copy (see the Resources section).

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