General Unix Commands

ls [directory]

list files in a named directory (default is current directory, uses * for wild anything and ? for one wild character)

pwd

gives name of current directory

jobs

lists jobs running in the current shell

ps -ux

lists all processes you are running

man command name

gives cryptic unix help notes on a command

cat filename

prints the contents of a file to the screen (like type in DOS)

more filename

prints the contents of a file to the screen, stopping at the bottom of each page so that you can read the file. Uses spacebar to continue, q to quit.

head -n filename

shows the first n lines of a file (default n=10)

tail -n filename

shows the first n lines of a file (default n=10)

lpr filename

sends a file to the printer

lpq

lists the print queue (good for seeing why printing is so slow and to get job numbers to use with lprm)

lprm job #

removes a job from the print queue (must belong to you)

cp filename1 directory/[filename2]

copies a file to a directory

mv filename1 directory/[filename2]

moves a file, used also for renaming

rm filename

deletes a file

mkdir directory

create a directory

rmdir directory

removes a directory

finger username

checks to see if someone is logged on

chmod code filename

sets protection levels, needed to make a script (file of unix commands) executable

history

lists the last commands used

xterm

opens a new xwindow

Dos lovers: it's easy to make scripts so that you can use your favorite DOS commands with unix. Here's an example so that dir will give a directory. First, create a file called dir to contain the unix commands needed.
cat >dir
ls $1 $2
Control-D
Explanation: cat with the right arrow directs input from the keyboard into a file. So file dir now contains ls $1 $2 . The $1 and $2 are storage markers for things you might want to type after dir, for instance when looking for all TeX files you could type dir *.tex. Or to get the full listing broken into pages we could "pipe" the output through more with command: dir *.tex |more. The control-D tells unix that we are done with keyboard input. Now dir is not an executable file, we have to use chmod on it:
chmod u+x dir
This command tells unix to allow the user (owner) to execute the file. Other choices for chmod are g for group or o for other (anyone) instead of u, and w for write or r for read instead of x. Finally, we should move the file into the bin directory to get it out of the way and put it where unix expects executable files, so use mv:
mv dir ~/bin

Other DOS scripts:
cat > del
rm $1 $2
Control-D

cat > type
cat $1 $2
Control-D

You can copy text from one window to another (or within a window) by marking with the left mouse button, then clicking the middle button to insert.

More Help:

Stat package demos for unix packages:

• Splus
• SAS
• R a freeware clone of S which has a nice index of functions on WWW pages. These work for Splus, too.
• Matlab
• Maple