A little Unix

You type Unix commands in a "shell". You can open a shell in Mac OS X by starting the Terminal application.

A Unix command consists of the name of the commands and one or more options or arguments. No parenthese are used in the commands

The following symbols may be used in arguments to Unix commands

• /
  Separates directories in the pathnames.
• ~
  The user's home directory. So ~/Documents refers to a directory called "Documents" within the user's home directory.
• .
  The current directory.
• ..
  The directory that is one level up. So ../Documents refers to a directory called "Documents" that is a sister of the current directory.
• * The wild card character; it matches character or sequences of characters. So *.java refers to all files that end in .java.

Here are the most important commands you will need.

• pwd
  Gives the current directory.
• cd
  Changes directory. So cd Documents/Java changes to a directory "Java" within a directory called "Documents" that is in the current directory. Within an argument, changes to the user's home directory.
• ls
  Lists the files in the current directory. With the -l option, it gives more information about the files.
• mv
  Moves a file. The destination is the second argument. If this is in the same directory as the file, this just changes the name of the file.
• cp
  Copies a file. The name to be used is the second argument.
• rm
  Deletes a file.
• mkdir
  Creates a new directory with the argument as its name.
• javac
  Runs the Java Compiler on the files in its argument.
• java
  Runs the Java application with its main method in the class that is named. The argument does not have the .class extension.
• javadoc
  Produces standard Java documentation for the classes in the source files in its argument.

© 2004. Indiana University and Michael Gasser. www.indiana.edu/~gasser/Q530/Notes/unix.html 1 Sep 2004