| In this lesson, we covered the use of Unix system utilities such as chsh, passwd, finger, date, who, and uptime. There are more utilities to choose from and use, but for a 10-minute lesson, this is plenty of information to digest and practice with. Remember, practice makes perfect, so make sure that you spend time using these commands; they are all helpful and will serve you well when needed, especially passwd. In fact, you should spend the greatest amount of time with the passwd command and master its usage, syntax, and available options. The following is a quick review of what was covered in this lesson: chsh Use the chsh command to change your current shell. If you don't know which shell you want to switch to, you can use chsh -l to list the available shells on your system. passwd/yppasswd The passwd command changes your account password. If you're in an environment with networked Unix computers, you might have to use the yppasswd command instead. finger This command looks up personal information about an account on your computer or on a remote computer. finger is sometimes disabled for security reasons, so you might not be able to use this command to get the results you expect. chfn You can change finger information using this command. For example, you can change your full name, your office address, and your office and home phone numbers in your account profile by using chfn. date Simply enough, date displays the current day and time on your computer. uptime The uptime command provides a summary of information about the state of your operating system, including the length of time it has been online, the number of users currently logged in, and the average load on your system during the past 15 minutes. who who enables you to see all the users who are logged in to your computer, the date that they connected, and the network address from which they are connected. If your machine seems slow, you might want to use who to find out where all the processor time is going.
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