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Systems Administration: January 11, 2000
This lecture was really intense --- we tried to cover a lot
of material, and barely succeeded. The rest of the course
will not have this tempo. My notes were broken into 3 sections
(please excuse the plain text format):
- Basics of Interaction: I've
found that many students are completely unfamiliar with
X windows and ideas behind UNIX graphical user interfaces.
This is a short discussion of these topics.
- The filesystem and processes
: Most of us will already be familiar with wandering
around the filesystem with operating systems that require
a graphics interface (Windows, MacOS). We may even not
realize that we're asking for a directory listing when we
open a `folder'. This part of the lecture was intended to
help you familiarize yourself with the mechanics of using
the UNIX filesystem. It was also intended to show you
another element of this multiuser, multitasking operating
system: the process table. The process is one of the
fundamental abstractions that UNIX provides. Each process
has a variety of statistics associated with it (arguably
the most important is the process ID [PID]), and permissions
are associated with their resources. These permissions will
be one of the things that makes UNIX such a robust operating
system --- they will insulate each process from the other
in a way that makes it much more difficult to `crash' the
machine.
- Shell scripting: After
learning a set of commands from the above section, we
are now able to learn how the shell provides a language
that will let us create `scripts' (just a collection
of commands) that can behave intelligently while not
requiring user interaction.
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