Linux Tutorial - Introduction To Linux

Linux is an operating system, just like Windows and MacOS. It allows you (the user) to interact with your computer, and provides many of the same tools you’re accustomed to in Windows and MacOS (web browsers, word processors, etc.).

In almost all CS classes, instructors will assume that you know your way around a Linux environment, and may require that you compile and run code in a Linux system. Being comfortable using the terminal, a command-line interface for interacting with the filesystem, running programs, etc, is an important part knowing your way around Linux.

In this tutorial you will learn how to:

Everyone should work through the first part, even students with prior experience with Linux, since it explains how to pick up the materials you will need to complete subsequent parts.

As for the rest of the tutorial, you are welcome to complete all the sections, but only some will be relevant for your current course(s). Check the instructions you received from your instructor(s) to determine which sections you need to complete.

Where should you do this tutorial?

Since one of the goals of this tutorial is for you to be able to use the CS department’s Linux environment, we strongly suggest you work through this tutorial on a UChicago CS software environment. While you can work through the tutorial in one of our computer labs, we recommend using SSH to log into a CS Linux server from your personal computer, as this will likely be the primary way you’ll be interacting with the CS department’s Linux systems.

Many of the steps in this tutorial can be replicated on a MacOS system or using Ubuntu WSL on Windows. While eventually you’ll be able to reuse these skills in those environments, for now, we strongly recommend that you use the Linux environment provided by the CS department.

Opening a Terminal Window

On your personal computer, you probably navigate your hard drive by double clicking on icons. While convenient for simple tasks, this approach is limited. For example, imagine that you want to delete all of the music files over 5 MB that you haven’t listened to in over a year. This task is very hard to do with the standard double-click interface but is relatively simple using the terminal.

If you are using SSH, connecting to a CS Linux server will directly open a terminal for you.

If you are using a desktop environment (e.g., you are sitting in CSIL), you can start a terminal by clicking on the Application icon (3x3 grid of dots) at the bottom left of the screen:

Then, type “terminal” in the input box. Click the “terminal” icon to open a terminal window. You can also use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+t.

Regardless of how you open the terminal, you will see something like this:

username@computer:~$

where username has been replaced by your CNetID and computer is the name of the machine you happen to be using. This string is called the prompt. When you start typing, the characters you type will appear to the right of the $.

The program that runs within a terminal window and processes the commands the you type is called a shell. We use bash, which is the default shell on most Linux distributions, but there are other popular shells, such as tcsh, zsh, etc.

The terminal will start in your home directory, /home/username/, which is a special directory (i.e., folder) assigned to your user account.

In each part of the tutorial, we will introduce a new concept or skill, and will provide a few simple examples. This includes examples of sample output throughout the tutorial. Bear in mind that the output you see when you run through our examples may vary a bit; this is normal. We have also included a few exercises in each section so you can practice these skills.

Pick Up the Tutorial Materials

To complete this tutorial, you will need a series of files to use with for the examples and exercises.

To fetch these files, run the following commands one at a time:

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

Note that we use $ to represent the Linux command-line prompt. Do not include it when you run the commands.

The first command (cd), which we explain in the Navigating the File System section, ensures that you are in your home directory. The second downloads up a compressed file from our GitHub site. And finally, the third command decompresses that file.

As an aside, be very careful when running wget commands that you find in instructions on the internet. You should always verify that the download site is legitimate.

After you run these commands, your home directory will contain a linux-tutorial-files directory that has some files for us to play with.

The next section of the tutorial covers Navigating the Filesystem.