Introduction to Linux

This is a Level 0: Foundation level course in ICHEC’s Education and Training sector.

This lesson, “Introduction to Linux” has been designed for a 2-3 hour session. The goals are to get users who have little to no experience of Linux to learn, practice and implement the most important concepts of using a command line interface.

This course will take you through from ground zero to being well practiced at UNIX commands and be able to transition to working on an HPC.

On completion of this course, you should be able to take our Level 2 course, Introduction to HPC.

This setup has been adapted from the Carpentries lesson example for use at ICHEC.

Prerequisites

For course participants, there are no strict prerequsities, aside from having your own account on a computer which you will use throughout the course. For Windows users, we recommend installing either MobaXterm (Portable Edition) or preferably Git Bash as a terminal emulator application to install on your machine.

For course participants

Supporting slides or presentation material can be found the slides directory.

Schedule

	Setup	Download files required for the lesson
00:00	1. Introducing Linux and the Command Line	What is Linux and Unix? What is the command line and why is it used? How do I get help when using the command line?
00:15	2. Navigating through files and directories	What is the directory tree? What is a path? What happens if I get lost? How do I move around? How can I see my files and folders? How can I use flags?
00:45	3. Working with files and directories	How do I create, copy, delete files and directories?
01:15	4. Useful Tools	How can I view file contents without needing a text editor How do wildcards work? How can I search for a string in a file What are pipes and how do they work? What are sed and awk?
01:55	5. Loops and Conditionals	How can I perform the same actions on many different files?
02:05	6. Bash Scripting	What is bash scripting What are the different text editors? How can I run a bash script?
02:30	7. ssh Keys	What is ssh and the secure shell? How does an ssh key work? What is the difference between a public and private key Why do I need an ssh key? How do I create an ssh key on different operating systems How do I log into a supercomputer?
02:45	8. Extra commands	How can I search for a string in a file What are pipes and how do they work? What are sed and awk? How can I see the differences between two files? How can I zip files? What are .tar archives?
03:00	Finish