Miscellaneous Notes

Common Commands

Learning unix can be a bit frustrating because you are given many tools and options, for a given task. When you ask how to do something, you will usually get a unique answer from each person. This is actually a good thing, because different tools have different strengths and weaknesses. Once you know the tools, Unix will become a very powerful computing environment. So to get you started, I have compiled a list of common tasks and the commands that you can use to accomplish the task.

Find a file

Tracking down a file in the file system can be a bit tricky for the newcomer. There are several ways of doing it. One is with the find command. Usually, you know the name of the file, and you want to figure out where it is. You can use the find command like this...

# find . -name myBook.doc

This command translates to "find in the current directory a file named myBook.doc". If you know it is in the /home directory somewhere, you can use find like this...

# find /home -name myBook.doc