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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: 34809 views
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Conclusions

This tutorial has provided a basic introduction to the Bash shell. After reviewing the history of UNIX shells and introducing the basic features of Bash, I discussed several ways to customize your Bash environment, including setting options and environment variables and customizing your Bash prompt. I also discussed basic techniques for working at the command-line prompt and concluded with an introduction to the basic Bash job control techniques.

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