Instructor

Mr. Daniel J. Hood
Office:ITE 215
Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday: 6:00pm - 7:00pm, or by appointment
E-mail: dhood2@cs.umbc.edu

Class Time and Place

TuWTh......5:30pm- 7:00pm (ENG 122A)

Textbooks

	Learning the Unix Operating System by Jerry D. Peek, Jerry Peek, Grace Todino, John Strang O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0596002610; 5th edition (January 15, 2002)
	GNU Emacs Pocket Reference by Debra Cameron, Gigi Estabrook O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 1565924967; (November 1998)

Course Description

An introductory course on UNIX intended primarily for incoming students new to UNIX and computing at UMBC. Topics include an introduction to the UMBC computing environment, basics of the UNIX environment, email using Pine, and the emacs/Xemacs editor. Students are required to obtain a UMBC GL account PRIOR to the first day of class.

Tentative List of Topics

1. Introduction to UMBC computing environment
   1. UMBC email addresses
   2. What is GL?
   3. What is Unix/Linux? How they differ?
   4. What is AFS?
   5. What is time sharing?
   6. Managing your GL account
      1. Logging in from home / dorm / campus labs
      2. Changing your password
      3. What's a quota?
      4. OIT cleanup script
      5. How to recover lost files
   7. What is a home directory?
   8. Navigating Directories
      1. cd ., cd .., cd ~, etc...
      2. Absolute and Relative paths
   9. Using directories to organize work ( ~/courses/cmscNNN/projN/ )
   10. File Basics
       1. What's a file?
       2. Viewing files
       3. Hidden Files
2. Unix Basics
   1. Basic Unix commands
      1. Case sensitivity
      2. Wild cards ( *, ? )
      3. cd, ls, pwd, more, exit, cp, mv, rm, rmdir, lpr, cat, mkdir, etc...
   2. Common Unix Pitfalls - "10 ways Unix will let you shoot yourself in the foot"
      1. Such as rm -f * .o
   3. Unix Files
      1. AFS ACL's ( fs, pts )
      2. File permissions
         1. Owner, Group, Others
         2. chmod
   4. Man pages
      1. man, apropos (man -k)
   5. Advanced
      1. .cshrc file
      2. Cutting and Pasting - mouse
      3. History (!n), alias, grep, $PATH
      4. Combining Commands using pipe ( | )
      5. IO redirection
      6. FTPing between UNIX and Windows
         1. Secure cp / Secure FTP - Unix as well for that matter
         2. dos2unix, mac2unix, unix2dos
3. Pine Tutorial
   1. Creating / Editing email
   2. Forwarding Mail
   3. Attaching files to email
   4. .signature file
4. Emacs / Xemacs Tutorial
   1. Basic Editing Commands
   2. Editing Multiple Files
   3. Back-up and Auto save
   4. .emacs Customization
      1. Auto Indenting for C/C++
      2. Line and Column Numbering
      3. Defining Keystrokes
      4. Syntax / Paren Highlighting
   5. Suspending emacs
   6. Compiling in emacs
5. Other Possible Topics
   1. Compilers - gcc & g++ (very brief)
   2. GDB Debugger (doubtful)
   3. What are...
      1. Window Managers
      2. Desktop Managers
      3. Gnome and KDE
      4. X Windows
   4. links (ln -s)
   5. UMBC submit family of commands - submit, submitls, submitrm, etc...
   6. clobber vs. noclobber
   7. $HOME/bin
   8. enscript
   9. typescript (very probable)
   10. Shells - primarily tcsh and/or bash
   11. indent
   12. ispell

Objectives

The objectives for this course are...

• To gain a better understanding of the UNIX environment.
• To gain a better understanding of the UMBC computing environment.
• To be able to do many day-to-day computer tasks using the UNIX environment.
• Learn some of the basic tools available to do software development in UNIX.
• To prepare student with basic UNIX skills needed for further study in Computer Science.

Grading

The grading method for this class is Pass/Fail only. The tentative format of assignments will be as follows...

• There will be 3-4 HW assignments worth 50% of the course grade
• There will be a final exam worth worth 50% of the course grade

Since the course is Pass/Fail, the following is the grade breakdown...

• Pass: >= 60.0%
• Fail: < 60.0%