Exploring the System

With these few key skills in hand, you're ready to start exploring your Unix system. In doing so, you can quickly get an idea of what's available and gain some useful experience in entering commands.

Think of your Unix system as being a thoroughly kid-proofed house: You can look around and touch some stuff, but you can't do anything to hurt yourself or the system. So, don't worry! You can't hurt anything by looking around, and even if you tried to break something, most Unix systems are configured well enough that you couldn't.

Table 1.1 shows some of the directories you're likely to find most interesting or useful (Appendix B of this book provides a more comprehensive list of directories). You can use the following steps to get started exploring.

Table 1.1. Common Unix Directories and Their Contents

DIRECTORY	CONTENTS
/bin	Essential programs and commands for use by all users
/etc	System configuration files and global settings
/home	Home directories for users
/sbin	Programs and commands needed for system boot
/tmp	Temporary files
/usr/bin	Commands and programs that are less central to basic Unix system functionality than those in /bin but were installed with the system
/usr/local	Most files and data that were developed or customized on the system
/usr/local/bin	Locally-developed or installed programs
/usr/local/man	Manual (help) pages for local programs
/usr/share/man	Manual (help) pages
/var	Changeable data, including system logs, temporary data from programs, and user mail storage

To explore locally installed programs:

1.	cd /usr/bin Change to /usr/bin, which is where most installed programs are.
2.	ls | more List the files (which will be programs, in this example) and pipe the output to more so you can read the names one screen at a time.
3.	ssh Type the name of any program you want to run; ssh, in this case, allows you to connect to another system and use it just as you're using your Unix system now.

Tip

• You can type man followed by a command name to learn more about Unix programs. See the next section for information about Unix help.