Contents:
Also see UNIX directories and files - a quick introduction.
Another complete tutorial is online here: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/index.html
Use Tab for filename completion: start a filename, and then hit <Tab> to finish it.
Use arrow keys for command line history and editing: up/down arrows will move you through commands you’ve run, and left/right arrows (plus backspace etc.) let you edit those commands.
‘head’ and ‘tail’ will display at the first 10 or last 10 lines of a text file, respectively. ‘head -20’ will display at the top 20 lines.
‘less’ will let you page through output. ‘q’ exits from ‘less’ before the end of the file.
Warning, this is dangerous; the ‘root’ account has complete control over your machine!
You can give other people access to your EC2 machine by setting a password for the ‘root’ account:
%% passwd root
You can also give them access to some or all your EC2 machines by giving them your private key, but this is a really bad idea.
A less dangerous way to do access control is to have them, or you, create a public/private key pair by doing:
%% ssh-keygen -t dsa -f new_key
Then add ‘new_key.pub’ to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys:
%% cat new_key.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
and give them the ‘new_key’ file as their private key to log into this EC2 machine only.
Use ‘top’ to keep track of what jobs are running on your machine, either under your current login/connection or from previous ones. Type ‘q’ to quit out of top.
The first column in top is the process ID, or PID. It’s usually a 3-5 digit number. You can do:
kill -9 $pid
(replacing $pid with the number) to stop the jobs.
A more complicated (but incredibly awesome, useful, and life-changing) way to run jobs is to use ‘screen’.
Install screen:
%% apt-get -y install screen
Run it:
%% screen
Now you have a “virtual” text window manager in which you can run programs and detach from/reattach to the programs.
Run some program, like bowtie or bwa.
Then ‘detach’ from your screen session: hit ‘CTRL-A’ followed by ‘d’.
Now you can log out and everything in the screen will continue to run.
To reattach, log back in and type ‘screen -r’. You will see the program still running and all of the output from it.
If you are running multiple screens, you can do
%% screen -ls
to see how many, and
%% screen -r $num
to reattach to a specific screen session.
Screen also lets you run multiple shells and switch between them, and it has its own copy/paste buffer, etc. So it can get pretty complicated!