UNIX SIG Notes
By Christopher J. Fearnley

Cruising the Information Superhighway with a Unix Shell Account

Many experienced Internauts consider the Unix shell account to be one of
the fastest and most powerful interfaces to the Internet's vast
resources. But it can be a little difficult to get started. So in this
month's article I want to inform PACS' members of some of the basic
concepts and commands for using a Unix account to manage Cyberspace. I
have been using a shell account on Net Access for the past couple of
months. My presentation will be somewhat biased toward their service,
but should be extendable to any Internet provider who offers shell
accounts.

The basic Internet services can be accessed with simple commands. I
will list some Internet services, describe them, explain the command and
point you to the on-line help (sometimes I'll even throw in an example).
First, NetNews is the Internet's BBS. There are over 4,000 newsgroups
available. Newsgroups run the full gamut from the profound to the
profane. I highly recommend reading at least news.announce.newusers and
news.answers to learn more about USENET and NetNews. There are many
available interfaces to NetNews: tin, trn and rn are among the most
popular. In Unix we refer to the on-line manual pages by "tin(1)",
"trn(1)", and "rn(1)" which simply means that one can type "man 1 tin"
or even more simply "man tin" to read up on how tin works. All three of
these newsreader offer help with the "h" key. I recommend trying tin:
it's very nice and by editing the ~/.tin/tinrc file (you may use the
command "pico ~/.tin/tinrc" to edit this file) it can be configured
almost anyway you want.

The other basic Internet service that everyone uses is mail. The two
main mailreaders under Unix are pine and elm. pine may be nicer for
newusers, but elm is also very nice and will be more familiar to those
of us who have been using the PACS Multi-SIG BBS. elm can be configured
by editing the ~/.elm/elmrc file. pine is configured best from one of its
internal menus (if you hate menus, avoid pine!). See elm(1) and pine(1)
for more info.

I have already mentioned editing some configuration files. You will
need an editor to post news and compose e-mail. There are many powerful
editors available under Unix: vi, vim, vile, emacs, jove, jed, joe, and
pico. Only vim, emacs and pico are currently available at Net Access
(you could use "archie jove" to find jove, for example, and compile it
yourself, however). pico is a brain-dead, but functional editor. emacs
is very, very powerful; you get help by typing C-h (ctrl + h). vim is
Vi IMproved. vi is the standard editor available on every Unix system.
It is very powerful (though not as flexible as emacs). You can get
on-line help within vim by typing :help. More vim help is available on
Net Access in /usr/local/doc in the files reference.doc and
vim-tutorial. There are good books on both vi and emacs at any
bookstore (the O'Reilly books come to mind as excellent tutorials).
Check out vi(1), vim(1), and pico(1) for more info.

Now to throw some more Internet-related programs at you. First, irc(1)
which is usually just shorthand for the newer ircII(1). This is the
Internet Relay Chat which is a global multi-user chat session. archie(1)
searches for programs available for ftp on the net. gopher(1) is a menu
interface to much of the Internet (generally you need to know the name
of a good gopher server to accomplish much). For starters you might try
"gopher veronica.scs.unr.edu". The two major ftp (file transfer
protocol) apps are ftp(1), ncftp(1). ncftp is particularly nice. ftp
lets you download files from around the Internet. Don't forget to
choose "binary" mode before downloading programs! Both of these programs
offer help with the "help" keyword.

The above should help you access the services offered by the Internet.
But to really take advantage of a Unix shell account you will want to
use the tools available under the Unix system. First, you will need to
navigate the filesystem. The Unix filesystem is hierarchical. It is
similar to DOS' except one uses "/" instead of "\" to separate directory
names. ls(1) lists files in the current directory. ls -a lists all
files (even the "hidden" ones). cd(1) is the command to change
directories. mkdir(1) makes a new directory and rmdir(1) removes a
directory. rm(1) deletes file(s) and mv(1) moves (or renames) them
(also works on directories). less(1) and more(1) are file browsers.
grep(1) is a file searcher. find(1) is a file finder. gzip(1) and
(un)compress(1) are file compression tools. tar(1) is a file archiving
tool. Many other tools are available and any good book on Unix will
cover them.

Since the Unix shell provides some wonderful features, I must discuss
these! There are many shells available: sh(1), bash(1), csh(1),
tcsh(1), ksh(1), zsh(1) and others. Basically the shell interprets your
command and arranges for Unix to run it. You can change your shell with
the "chsh bash" command for example (this will not take effect until
your next login -- you can test a new shell with, e.g., "bash -i" to get
an interactive bash shell). bash, tcsh and ksh are modern shells and
very full-featured. sh is the original shell and is not recommended for
interactive use. csh was an improvement over sh for interactive use. I
like bash because it is very full-featured (it combines most of the csh
and sh features and adds some new ones too). bash supports a help
function (just type "help" from the command line). One of the most
useful features that most shells support is job control. Most jobs
(programs) can be suspended with ^Z, use "fg" to bring the job back into
the foreground and "bg" to continue running the command in the
background. The "jobs" command will list your jobs, useful if you have
more than one. bash and tcsh (at least) support command and filename
completion with TAB or ^I. Both also support command history which can
be navigated with the arrow keys and edited.

That should be enough to get you started cruising on the Information
Superhighway with a Unix shell account. There are many more commands
and each command mentioned has numerous command-line options that modify
its behavior (so reading those man pages can take awhile!). You can get
more help from the newsgroup comp.unix.questions or its FAQ located at
rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet-by-group/comp.unix.questions (which is a syntax
accepted by ncftp to bring you directly to the directory in question).

The latest news on the Linux front

Michael K. Johnson (editor of Linux Journal) and others estimate that
there are over 2 million installed Linux systems worldwide. This
means that Linux is just behind the Mac as the third most popular OS
on the market today.

Linus announced yet another code freeze for the 1.2 kernel (we are at
version 1.1.85 at the time of this writing). Unfortunately, no sooner
had the announcement gone out but numerous people submitted patches to
him that they were holding onto. So the code freeze barely got started
when new features were added. Maybe we will see 1.2 by the February
meeting, maybe we will have a much more featureful kernel several months
from now. Who can predict the march of free software? Or even
commercial software!

Next month's meeting will be Q & A. We really need a system to demo
Linux on. Anyone have a laptop or desktop you can demo your system on?
For the March festival it would be nice to have a Linux booth. Anyone
see anyway to set this up? Some people said they would like to go to
the noon demo of PACS' IBM SIG's new Internet connection with Net
Access. I will stay with the Unix SIG for the second hour if there is
interest in continuing any discussions, but for the sake of argument
consider the Unix SIG to only run from 11 am - noon this month.