Tutorial - Advanced Linuxļƒ

This tutorial covers a few advanced topics related to using a Linux environment. These topics are typically not essential to perform basic tasks in a Linux environment, but some classes may assume that you are familiar with the topics covered in this tutorial.

This tutorial assumes that you have worked through the Linux Basics tutorial, or are already familiar with the topics covered in that tutorial. If you did not work through the Linux Basics tutorial but are comfortable with the material covered in it, make sure you download the files from the Linux Basics tutorial, as we will be using them in this tutorial as well. You can do so like this:

$ wget -nv https://uchicago-cs.github.io/dev-guide/_static/linux-tutorial-files.zip
$ unzip linux-tutorial-files.zip

This will create a linux-tutorial-files directory that has some files for us to play with.

Running Commands Sequentiallyļƒ

It is often convenient to chain together commands that you want to run in sequence. For example, recall that to print the working directory and list all of the files and directories contained inside, you would use the following commands:

$ pwd
/home/username/
$ ls
Desktop  Documents  Downloads  Music  Pictures  Public  Templates  Videos

You could also run them together by separating them with a semicolon, like so:

$ pwd ; ls
/home/username/
Desktop  Documents  Downloads  Music  Pictures  Public  Templates  Videos

First, pwd is executed and run to completion, and then ls is executed and run to completion. The two examples above are thus equivalent, but the ability to run multiple commands together is a small convenience that could save you some time if there is a group of commands that you want to execute sequentially.

Note

What actually acts as a separator between the comments is the semicolon, and the shell is generally pretty flexible about the amount of white space separating commands, arguments, etc., so it will run any of the following as well:

$ pwd;ls
$ pwd ;ls
$ pwd; ls
$ pwd       ;        ls

Working with Input/Output Streamsļƒ

When you run a program (at the command-line or by clicking), the Linux operating system creates a new process for running the program. Every Linux process has an input stream (known as standard in) for providing input to a program and two output streams, one for regular output (known as standard out) and one for providing information about errors (known as standard error). In this section, you will learn how to use these streams to provide input to a program and to capture the output.

Redirectionļƒ

The examples in this section will use commands that weā€™ve not yet discussed. Refer to the man pages for information about unfamiliar commands.

As we already know, commands like pwd and ls, and cat will print output to screen by default. Sometimes, however, we may prefer to write the output of these commands to a file. In Linux, we can redirect the output of a program to a file of our choosing. This operation is done with the > operator.

Try the following example and compare your output with ours:

$ cd
$ touch test-0.txt
$ ls > test-1.txt
$ cat test-1.txt
Desktop
Documents
Downloads
Music
Pictures
Public
Templates
test-0.txt
test-1.txt
Videos
$ echo "Hello World!" > test-2.txt
$ cat test-2.txt
Hello World!
$ cat test-2.txt > test-1.txt; cat test-1.txt
Hello World!
$ rm test-*

Two important things to note:

  1. If you redirect to a file that does not exist, that file will be created.

  2. If you redirect to a file that already exists, the contents of that file will be overwritten.

You can use the append operator (>>) to append the output of command to the end of an existing file rather than overwrite the contents of that file.

Not only can we redirect the output of a program to a file, we can also have a program receive its input from a file. This operation is done with the < operator. For example:

$ python3 my_echo.py < my-input.txt

(Change back to your linux-tutorial-files directory before you try this command.)

In general, all Linux processes can perform input/output operations through, at least, the keyboard and the screen. More specifically, there are three ā€˜input/output streamsā€™: standard input (or stdin), standard output (or stdout), and standard error (or stderr). The code in my_echo.py simply reads information from stdin and writes it back out to stdout. The redirection operators change the bindings of these streams from the keyboard and/or screen to files. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will only care about standard input and standard output.

Exercisesļƒ

  1. Run my_echo.py as shown above.

  2. Run my_echo.py again, but this time redirect the output to a file named output.txt. Check the contents of output.txt using an editor or by using the cat or more commands.

  3. Run my_echo.py redirecting the input from test.txt and the output to output2.txt. Check the contents of output2.txt.

  4. When you are done, remove output.txt and output2.txt.

Note

Notice how, if you run python3 my_echo.py without redirecting the input, it will patiently wait for you to type some input for it to echo. Once you type some input and hit return, the program will echo your input, and then resume waiting for input. It will continue to do so until you exit by typing Ctrl-d. Give it a try!

Pipingļƒ

In addition to the ability to direct output to and receive input from files, Linux provides a very powerful capability called piping. Piping allows one program to receive as input the output of another program, like so:

$ program1 | program2

In this example, the output of program1 is used as the input of program2. Or to put it more technically, the stdout of program1 is connected to the stdin of program2.

As another more concrete example, consider the man command with the -k option that weā€™ve previously discussed in the Man Pages section of the Linux Basics Tutorial. Letā€™s assume that you hadnā€™t yet been introduced to the mkdir command. How would you look for the command to create a directory? First attempts:

$ man -k "create directory"
create directory: nothing appropriate
$ man -k "directory"
(a bunch of mostly irrelevant output)

As we can see, neither of these options is particularly helpful. However, with piping, we can combine man -k with a powerful command line utility called grep to find what we need:

$ man -k "directory" | grep "create"
mkdir (2)            - create a directory
mkdirat (2)          - create a directory
mkdtemp (3)          - create a unique temporary directory
mkfontdir (1)        - create an index of X font files in a directory
mklost+found (8)     - create a lost+found directory on a mounted Linux second extended fil...
mktemp (1)           - create a temporary file or directory
pam_mkhomedir (8)    - PAM module to create users home directory
update-info-dir (8)  - update or create index file from all installed info files in directory
vgmknodes (8)        - recreate volume group directory and logical volume special files

Nice.

Exercisesļƒ

  1. Use piping to chain together the printenv and tail commands to display the last 10 lines of output from printenv.

  2. Replicate the above functionality without using the | operator. (hint: Use a temporary file.)

File Permissionsļƒ

Sometimes we want to restrict who can access certain resources on the file system.

Most file systems assign ā€˜File Permissionsā€™ (or just permissions) to specific users and groups of users. Unix is no different. File permissions dictate who can read (view), write (create/edit), and execute (run) files on a file system.

All directories and files are owned by a user. Each user can be a member of one or more groups. To see your groups, enter the command groups into the command line.

File permissions in Unix systems are managed in three distinct scopes. Each scope has a distinct set of permissions.

User - The owner of a file or directory makes up the user scope.

Group - Each file and directory has a group assigned to it. The members of this group make up the group scope.

Others - Every user who does not fall into the previous two scopes make up the others scope.

If a user falls into more than one of these scopes, their effective permissions are determined based on the first scope the user falls within in the order of user, group, and others.

Each scope has three specific permissions for each file or directory:

read - The read permission allows a user to view a fileā€™s contents. When set for a directory, this permission allows a user to view the names of files in the directory, but no further information about the files in the directory. r is shorthand for read permissions.

write - The write permission allows a user to modify the contents of a file. When set for a directory, this permission allows a user to create, delete, or rename files. w is shorthand for write permissions.

execute - The execute permission allows a user to execute a file (or program) using the operating system. When set for a directory, this permission allows a user to access file contents and other information about files within the directory (given that the user has the proper permissions to access the file). The execute permission does not allow the user to list the files inside the directory unless the read permission is also set. x is shorthand for execute permissions.

To list information about a file, including its permissions, type:

ls -l <filepath>

Youā€™ll get output of the form:

<permissions> 1 owner group <size in bytes> <date modified> <filepath>

For example, if we want information on /usr/bin/python3.8:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/python3.8
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5486384 Jan 27  2021 /usr/bin/python3.8

First thing we can notice is that the owner of the file is a user named root. The fileā€™s group is also root.

Note

root is a name for an account that has access to all commands and files on a Linux system. Other accounts may also have ā€œrootā€ privileges.

The permissions are -rwxr-xr-x. The initial dash (-) indicates that /usr/bin/python3.8 is a file, not a directory. Directories have a d instead of a dash. Then the permissions are listed in user, group, and others order. In this example, the owner, root, can read (r), write (w), and execute (x) the file. Users in the root group and all other users can read and execute the files.

By default, any files or directories that you create will have your username as both the user and the group. (If you run groups, youā€™ll notice that there is a group with the same name as your username. You are the only member of this group.) On our Linux machines, by default, new files are give read and write permissions to user and group and no permissions to other. New directories will be set to have read, write and execute permissions for user and group.

Exerciseļƒ

Note

If you have not completed the Linux Basics Tutorial, create a new directory and file by running the following in your linux-tutorial-files directory:

$ mkdir backups
$ cp test.txt backups/copy2.txt

Verify that the permissions in your directories and files were set correctly by running ls -l backups/copy2.txt and ls -ld  backups in your linux-tutorial-files directory.

The -d flag tells ls to list the directory, instead of its contents. Notice that that the first letter in the permissions string for backups is a d, while it is a - for backups/copy2.txt.

Once you have verified the claim, go ahead and remove the backups directory.

Changing Permissions, Owner, & Groupļƒ

chmod <permissions> <path-name>

set the permissions for a file/directory

chmod <changes> <path-name>

update the permissions for a file/directory

chown <username> <path-name>

change the owner of a file to username

chgrp <group> <path-name>

change the group of a file

To change permissions, we use the chmod command. There are two ways to specify the permissions. Weā€™ll describe the more accessible one first: to set the permissions you specify the scope using a combination of u, g, and o, the permission using r, w, and x, and either + or - to indicate that you want to add or remove a permission. For example uo+rw indicates that you want to add read and write permissions for the user and others groups.

We can demonstrate this using the cat command:

$ echo "Hello!" > testfile
$ ls -l testfile
-rw-rw---- 1 username username 7 Aug 23 11:22 testfile
$ cat testfile
Hello!
$ chmod ug-r testfile   #remove read and permissions from user and group
$ ls -l testfile
--w--w---- 1 username username 7 Aug 23 11:22 testfile
$ cat testfile
cat: testfile: Permission denied
$ chmod u+r testfile    #give user scope read permissions

In this last example, we have added user read permissions to testfile.

In addition to the symbolic method for setting permissions, you can also use a numeric method: each permission has a unique value: read = 4, write = 2, execute = 1. As a result, you can describe the permissions of each scope using the sum of its permissionsā€™ values. For example, if a file has read and write permissions for the user scope, its permissions can be described as 6 (4 + 2 = 6).

You can describe the permissions of a file overall using these values for each scope. For example, 761 describes the permissions for a file with read, write, and execute permissions for the user scope, read and write permissions for the group scope, and only execute permissions for the others scope.

The symbolic approach is relative: it allows you to add and remove permissions relative the the current file permissions. The numeric method is absolute: it sets the permissions to a specific configuration. We recommend starting the symbolic approach. It is easier to get right. As you get more comfortable with setting permissions, it is useful to learn how to use the numeric method.

To change the owner of a file or directory (if you are the owner or root), use the command:

chown <new owner> <path to file>

To change a fileā€™s group (if you are the owner or root), use the command:

chgrp <new group> <path to file>

Exercisesļƒ

  1. Run echo "Hello!" > testfile to construct testfile. Look at the permissions using ls -l.

  2. Change the permissions on testfile to allow write and read access for others. Run ls -l testfile to check the new permissions.

  3. Remove group write access from testfile. Check the corrected permissions.

  4. Remove testfile using rm.

Acknowledgementsļƒ

Parts of this tutorial are based on a Linux lab originally written for CMSC 12100 by Prof. Anne Rogers and Prof. Borja Sotomayor, and edited by numerous instructors and TAs over the years.