The Shell and The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard - Katy Huff
Attending
About 35 folks! No attendance was taken, though.
Katy Huff
Katy Huff is a postdoc with NSSC and BIDS.
The Shell
There was some interested in the shell. In particular, someone was interested in ksh. So, let’s cover shells.
Various Shells
Shell programs are just programming languages. The flavors include:
- sh
- csh
- tsh
- zsh
- ksh
- bash
What are the differences? Mostly syntax. For serious shell programming, they vary mostly in the way they treat arrays, their order of operations, and their way they treat variable scope.
Basics in the Shell
I’m actually going to cheat here and use the first chapter of my new book to cover the shell basics really quickly.
I know that’s not a very open source way to go about things, because you’d have to buy the book to get this material later. Be cool. The same material is covered beautifully by Software Carpentry.
Customizing Your Shell
In any shell, there are files that can be used to customize its behavior. These files hold bash commands that are run at the start of each shell session. For bash these are usually:
- .bash_profile
- .bashrc
- .bash_aliases
The profile file is called first and sources other files (such as bashrc and aliases). Many people keep their bashrc files online. Let’s find some good ones and browse them. I keep mine online so that I can get back to work instantly if my laptop self-immolates. Let’s talk about some of the things you can do to make your life easier with bashrc.
The Filesystem
All of this is very exciting. The shell provides a nice transparent interface to the filesystem. But, what’s the point of having an interface to the filesystem?
Pretty much everything in a UNIX or Linux operating system is a file that you can look at. Since you’re a human with skillz, this means that pretty much everything in the operating system is something you can investigate, manipulate, and control.
The only way to know the potential power of the filesystem is to understand the filesystem hierarchy standard.
The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
On a linux machine, the placement of directories at the top level of the filesystem is not just systematic, it is standardized. The standard provides a place for each thing that might be needed on your filesystem.
I feel like this kind of skill should be used in only two ways:
- to be more efficient
- to prank your friends
Thankfully, the filesystem provides plenty of opportunities for both.
/bin
Binary files are utilities like commands and programs. System level binary files are held in bin.
/lib
Libraries are compiled software with APIs that can be used by other source code on your system. System level libraries are held in lib. UNIX machines don’t have lib at the top level, but they do have it at lower levels. We’ll see this when we address opt and usr.
/dev
Even hardware has a filesystem representation. In dev, block and character devices are linked to the operating system through file-like objects. Browse dev… what devices do you see? Can you find your printer? What is zero? What is random?
It used to be the case that you could pipe random numbers into the file that held your speakers (try ‘cat /dev/random > /dev/dsp’). It isn’t true with modern linux, unfortunately. Now all audio moves through a program (on linux it is called aplay) before it hits the device.
On linux, try:
| cat /dev/urandom | aplay |
On macs, try:
say the hacker within rocks
/proc
The processes on your machine are represented in the filesystem by what appear to be files. This isn’t true on a mac. However, it’s really cool.
/boot
Macs don’t have this. Linux does. What do you think it holds? Why should this be part of the filesystem?
/mnt
This is where things get mounted (CDs, USB drives, etc.). Note that a lot of these will also be accessible via the device number of their port. Unlike the port, though, you can unmount things that are mounted.
/opt
When you want to install a library or a program, you might want to do it in this optional space. This space reflects the top-level system hierarchy.
/usr
An almost exactly equivalent space is here in usr.