Summary

This lesson has given you the basic skills to work within the Unix file system. If you have any problems with this material, please practice it before moving to the next lesson. The following is a review of some of this lesson's specifics:

• Unix is case sensitive. Pay careful attention to case, especially if you're transferring files between a Unix machine and a personal computer.

• Unix files have three attributes: read, write, and execute. You can use these attributes to control access to a file.

• The pwd command tells you where you are.

• The ls command tells you what files are in a directory.

• The cd command takes you to different locations based on where you want to go.

• The pushd command remembers where you were, and the popd command takes you back to that location.

• Use relative paths whenever you can because they are shorter and easier to remember than absolute paths. It's usually much more convenient to use a relative path from your current directory than to use an absolute path from /.

• Remember that all these features and commands work together. Unix is about combining many small programs and features into a convenient tool that performs precisely as you want it to.

• Desktop environments can make your life easier; they automate many routine day-to-day tasks and provide a friendly face for some of the more difficult ones. If your system doesn't have KDE, don't fretchances are that KDE can be installed on your system or that your system already comes with a nice desktop environment with comparable capabilities.